[antisemiotic]

Mathematica and Maxima are much more functional, for what is worth. Mathematica is pretty much a redressed Lisp (much lispier than Julia), and Maxima is not even redressed (it uses s-expressions).

>Procedural languages that are inherently distanced from math are used for math for whatever reason.

I think that historically it wasn't easy to make an efficient functional language. Numerical languages all trace back to Fortran after all (which is still alive and well). Nowadays, I think it's mostly because of inertia, and researchers having better things to do than learning a completely different programming language.