New version of Mathematica released

The signal-to-noise ratio of that article is incredible low. What did I get out of the post?

- You can now type wolframalpha-style in mathematica.

- You now have over 3000 built-in functions (i.e., too many to remember ;)

The rest was just Wolfram telling the world in many different ways how great mathematica was/is/will be. Adjectives include: huge, important, dramatic, breakthrough, major, slow & lumbering (to describe others), etc. Hell, "great" is mentioned 6 times in the post!

I'm curious about their implementation of NLP. This has enormous potential as a teaching tool - the biggest hurdle to getting more out of a package like this on first use is not knowing how to interact with it. However, I had had similar expectations of Alpha, and was greatly disappointed. though full of witty easter eggs and stocked with a rich variety of datasets, exploratory queries proved sadly frustrating.

Here's what I want to see in version 9 (laugh now, realize I'm right later): Kinect interaction. Perhaps unwittingly, Microsoft have just launched the next great peripheral and it seems intuitively popular with the public in a way I haven't seen for years and years. Now, imagine you've generated or imported a mathematically-specified 3d object in M., and imagine it inside a bounding box with handles on the vertices and local minima/maxima. Multi-point, multi-d interactivity would be both absorbing for students and potentially extremely productive for professionals, without requiring significant retooling of the core.

Alternatives like Matlab, Maple, Stata all have basically the same 'look' to their default graphing packages.

Even though Mathematica would not be the right choice for statistical processing, the graphs it produces are a step above the rest.

So depends what you're use case is.. any of the above would look good enough for an academic paper. But if you're going to be publishing these in a magazine, they probably won't cut it.