- Open Source dominates.
Unlike Mathematica, Matlab and Excel, Jupyter and Python are open source programs. It means you can see exactly what’s under the hood anytime you’d like. It’s all open source and out there for the public to view, review, examine, admire and get inspired by. This is a very different story than proprietary software which is a black box with no sneak peak.
“It is along this social dimension that open source unambiguously dominates the proprietary model. Moreover, at a time when trust and truth are in retreat, the social dimension is the one that matters.”
Transparency over secrecy.
Professor Romer suggests in his post that: “Jupyter rewards transparency; Mathematica rationalizes secrecy. Jupyter encourages individual integrity; Mathematica lets individuals hide behind corporate evasion. Jupyter exemplifies the social systems that emerged from the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, systems that make it possible for people to cooperate by committing to objective truth; Mathematica exemplifies the horde of new Vandals whose pursuit of private gain threatens a far greater pubic loss–the collapse of social systems that took centuries to build.”
Strong words indeed.
Easy to use.
He goes on: “It [Jupyter] offers the best REPL I’ve ever used. It lets me get quick feedback, via text or graphics, about what happens when I select a line of code and run it.”
This sums up the amazing convenience of Jupyter in research and education very nicely.
Excellent Libraries
This one should be obvious, Python has some of the best -and most abundant- libraries in the programming world: “Python libraries let me replicate everything I wanted to do with Mathematica: Matplotlib for graphics, SymPy for symbolic math, NumPy and SciPy for numerical calculations, Pandas for data, and NLTK for natural language processing.”
Awesome Community.
“I’m more productive. I’m having fun. On both counts, it helps to be able to get an honest answer when I have a question.”