session

yes - and the thing that makes python approachable is the syntax and standard formatting. I love LISP, I'm not confused or annoyed by the parens, but many people are. LISP would be more popular if there was a good (browser-based) hybrid structural editor with the keyboard-navigation familiarity of a text editor, in a notebook format where the LISP code is displayed like Python (the parens hidden, and handled automatically, but serialized as normal LISP code behind the scenes). This is not that hard to do, and we're nearly there: * http://gorilla-repl.org/ * https://github.com/kovasb/session (Also my own early abandoned experiments: http://celeriac.net/iiiiioiooooo/ http://celeriac.net/iiiiioiooooo/public/ http://celeriac.net/iiiiioiooooo-dom/ http://celeriac.net/io/public/)

I have no problem shelling out the money for the (student) license. I've worked at Wolfram and I could probably swing a free license anyway. There are already a variety of clones out there that can do some of what Mathematica already does. d3 and javascript can replicate some of the manipulate work. I mean, look at session: https://github.com/kovasb/session Mathematica being open source would mean that I could look at the source though and see what the hell is going on inside. I'd love to see how they are doing call outs to R and trace through all the interactions between the kernel, the user interface, and W|A. If it were open source, I could see the implementations of all the Mathematical algorithms and look at all the neat optimizations and new results they have found during their work. I care about the "math in Mathematica and am inte