I posted this article, written by Paul Romer, because while it is a few years old, the questions it adresses are more actual than ever - it could have been written yesterday. It is about propietary systems slurping up and commecializing freely available content from an economy of freely sharing ideas and facts.
The article asks why Jupyter succeed where Mathematica failed. The obvious contrast is between the proprietary world of Wolfram and the open-source model of the software ecosystem that Jupyter mobilizes.
[…]
He goes on to detail how this was implemented concretely, and what were the practical effects.
Wolfram made it hard to share a readable PDF version of a notebook because it wanted someone like me to distribute content in its proprietary file format, the CDF.
By the way, Romer starts with mentioning an article in The Atlantic, which is worth reading as well, since it brilliantly describes the achievement of Wolfram, as well as its propietary model and the effects of applying it to science. That article may not be accessible to everyone any more. An archived version of that article is here.
It compares mathematica to jupyter and mentions julia once at the end. 7 years later, julia did not yet crush python. R and Python can also be used within notebooks. Mathematica can be used with neither of the languages.
You can simply use notebooks with your desired tool, whereas you have to learn new stuff with mathematica. Barrier to entry is much bigger for m. R has free advertising by universities. Python has huge advertising by youtubers. Mathematica was already a nieche 10 years ago.
Back in the day you would usually compare julia with matlab for the similarities. Here it’s simply about the format of the notebook. I think the focus of the post could’ve been much narrower and focus solely on the format.
Why would you choose jupyter notebooks over cdf? Simple question: can you use python with cdf? The answer has nothing to do with open source vs proprietary.