[ogogmad]

I've started using Mathematica recently. I quite like it: I've used Sympy before, which was good, but nowhere near as "good" as Mathematica. How does it compare to the Lisp Machine operating systems? There's some vague resemblance to Lisp in treating symbols as a basic type of object. In the Mathematica use-case, these symbolic values are used to stand for algebraic variables or unknowns. Undeclared variables by default have symbolic type, with their own names being their values. (I know that other CASes do similar things here). Also, algebraic manipulations produce expressions which double as Mathematica code, which resembles the meta-programming features of Lisp. There's even glimpses of reactive programming in the way you construct interactive plots.

I know this is "uncouth" because it's commercial software, but Mathematica is one of the most interesting programs I've ever used. [edit] Might something like this be the future?