[aragilar]

I've seen some people use it like you would use Matlab, R or Python (I wouldn't recommend it...), but it can (mostly) do symbolic stuff quite easily. I've seen it used in maths and physics, mostly by theorists. If you've made it part of your workflow, I suspect it's irreplaceable, but the best way to think about it is its one of those tools that gets used because the topic is small/bespoke enough that it's hard to build a replacement without having all the existing features (there a number of these in physics/engineering).

Its biggest flaw is how much it wants to act as a black box, which means when something goes wrong, or isn't exactly what you want, you spend more time trying to fix it than solving the original problem.