i'm always amazed about how powerful mathematica is and then sad about how niche it is. not sure they could do better if they went the R route (open source things) as more and more they're vertically integrated, but i do wonder what things would be like if it were much more widely used in education and business.

what’s the big new thing in Version 11? Well, it’s not 1 big thing; it’s many big things. To give a sense of scale, there are 555 completely new functions that we’re adding in Version 11—representing a huge amount of new functionality (by comparison, Version 1 had a total of 551 functions altogether). And actually that function count is even an underrepresentation—because it doesn’t include the vast deepening of many existing functions.