alt Hacker News> And I'm being generous when I say "pretty": I have never encountered it in any job or even in academia. People know of it. They just don't use it for work.
To my knowledge, at least in academia, Wolfram (Mathematica) seems to be used quite a bit by physicists. Also in some areas of mathematics it is used (but many mathematicians seems to prefer Maple). Concerning mathematical research, I want to mention that by now also some open-source (and often more specialized) CASs seem to have become more widespread, such as SageMath, SymPy, Macaulay2, GP/PARI or GAP.
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I've been at a few universities and labs as a postdoc, and a Mathematica license always came either as part of the University or the department. It might not be relevant in some disciplines, but generally I assume it must be used a lot to warrant such broad licensing (it is a tool I use daily as a theoretical physicist).
In Maple sin(x) is "sin(x)", in Mathematica it's "Sin[x]", ewww
You're right -- the theoretical particle physicists at my faculty were using Mathematica very heavily when I was still in academia and maintained a dedicated compute cluster for it.
They really did not appreciate the debugging experience, but maybe that's improved in 15 years. :)