In a "collaborative" environment, if you are working among retards for a PHB, I recommend picking a revision control system that no one else knows how to use or install clients for (darcs may be a good idea)
-75 comment votes; +125 article points - you are a genius. As to your company, I'd never even heard of it before. There is no such thing as bad publicity.
I haven't used Mathematica 9.0 and its chemistry-related functions, but from the presentations, they look like practically useless toys for dabbles.
Can Mathematica do raytracing, display secondary structure, semi-transparent molecular surface and allow you to select coloring patterns? Is it easy to predict protonation states of molecules at different pH levels and electrostatic potentials? Can it do molecular dynamics?
Who cares that they have built-in access to the melting point of caffeine?!
> Ultimately, this is why I like Python. The belief that best practices shouldn't be optional, and that they shouldn't be difficult creates a community where you actively want to go and learn from people's code.
This place I know was one of the earliest adopters of Python, and the code they barfed up must be the buggiest, ugliest (GUI), slowest in its class software I've ever seen. It's so buggy, it's insane: typos, calling methods that don't exist, assuming arbitrary user input does not have 'keywords' in them...
They couldn't write code in C, so they thought the problem was with the language and switched to Python.
I say, lousy programmers, if they don't want to look for another occupation, should stick with Java - at least the typos will be caught more frequently.