It has to be low enough for mass adoption. I’d guess $2/mo or $10/yr.
I paid for the $200 license back in high school 10 years ago and it was absolutely amazing; Really ahead of its time and well worth the money. But today as a software engineer the only feature I’m missing in Python is the ability to run natural language expressions in the middle of my code. Besides that, Python is far superior thanks to the community investment and the ability to easily deploy my code.
I agree. I am still using Mathematica 5 for Students, which I purchased when I was a student. Despite the fact that at the time I bought the version for Windows, it is worki g like a charm on my Linux laptop thanks to Wine.
Nowadays my daily workflow is mainly based on Python and Julia, I use Mathematica just for symbolic calculations (solving differentialequations, computing integrals...)
P.S. Once I had the chance to use Mathematica 12 on a server in my University, but I found that it offered nothing that I could need that wasn't already in version 5...
For the record, the question was not about getting "mass adoption" but about the price that would make such a lovely product worth it for a hobbyist. Most hobbys are much more expensive than $10 per year!
Sure, I’d gladly pay $200 again if it had a large community and a deployment story. What I meant is that I wouldn’t use it again unless it achieved mass adoption. That in turn requires dirt cheap pricing even if I don’t directly care about the price.
I paid for the $200 license back in high school 10 years ago and it was absolutely amazing; Really ahead of its time and well worth the money. But today as a software engineer the only feature I’m missing in Python is the ability to run natural language expressions in the middle of my code. Besides that, Python is far superior thanks to the community investment and the ability to easily deploy my code.