Without the proprietary and exclusive hardware, something like CUDA would DoA. Wolfram is trying that, as MathCad and Maple did back in the day and still MATHLAB kind of pulled off (Octave is coming though). This is a pretty steep slope they're fighting against because many programmers don't want to give away that sort of control easily. I remember when closed-source SmallTalk was the norm in the 90s, also Fortran systems or EIFFEL. Borland, Delphi, Watcom did okay for some time but they didn't lock you in so hard - it was "something standard with extensions" (a bit like C# which by the way, I avoid on these grounds alone).