| I came across Mathematica via Wolfram Alpha while studying for a Maths degree. I was quite astonished by its capabilities, and have been playing with it ever since. For context I work full time in an industry unrelated to software, and have kids and all the chaos that goes with them, so have relatively little time to devote to programming. I need something that 'just works'. I've always felt that I should enjoy programming, and have had several false starts including HyperCard and Eiffel back in the day. But Mathematica / Wolfram Language is the first time programming has actually clicked. There are various aspects to the Wolfram Language that make it work for me; - The documentation is enormous, comprehensive and even editable and executable (desktop install). I haven't seen anything that comes close in any other language (Racket would probably be a distant second). In the snatches of time I have, all the information I need can be found using the F1 key, I don't have to waste time going to Stack Exchange and asking others for help - The concept of everything being an M-expression makes the language very logical. Sub-expressions can themselves be evaluated and understood, larger expressions built out of smaller ones etc - Lots of syntactic sugar IMO makes the M-Expressions more readable than Lisp S-Expressions, while retaining their usefulness in making code understandable - Very powerful pattern matching and structural operations on expressions, which are great tools for manipulating expressions and extracting code or data - Strong support for functional programming, which I find to be more enjoyable than procedural programming - The language is symbolic, which often allows you to 'play' with programs and understand how they will work in an abstract way before using with real data. As a toy example you can literally fold an abstract function with abstract expressions, e.g. inputting Fold[f,x,{a,b,c,d}] returns f[f[f[f[x,a],b],c],d]. - a huge standard library built in, all working in a way that is remarkably consistent for such a wide diversity of domains, and a language that has been in development for 30+ years - interactive notebook programming allows me to document my notes and progress along with the code I did try a few FLOSS options primarily for access to their communities and also ease of deployment (e.g. F#, Clojure, Java) but haven't found anything comes close for my particular needs. I suspect that Racket would be the next best thing. I think the Wolfram Language does suffer from the Lisp curse, in that it is sufficiently powerful and well documented that individual developers can go a long way without recourse to a community, which in turn hence hinders the establishment and growth of such communities. I would strongly recommend spending some time learning the fundamentals of the language. My favourite resource is Paul Wellin's An Introduction to Programming with Mathematica (2013). I suspect a lot of the criticism of Mathematica comes from those who haven't learnt the fundamentals, and expect it to work like Python or Java etc, when in fact it is more like a cousin of Lisp. |