This is a rather superficial reason to start such a project.
Mathematica is non popular because of its syntax, it is popular because of its extensive library, graphics capabilities and documentation.
If you want to make free software packages more competitive compared to mathematica, the best way would be to work on extending their libraries, documentation and graphical capabilities, not increase the fragmentation by starting yet another package from scratch doing the same thing just using a slightly different syntax.
For all intents and purposes, from an user's point of view, this project is as a waste of time as writing yet another scheme interpreter.
Mathematica is non popular because of its syntax, it is popular because of its extensive library, graphics capabilities and documentation.
If you want to make free software packages more competitive compared to mathematica, the best way would be to work on extending their libraries, documentation and graphical capabilities, not increase the fragmentation by starting yet another package from scratch doing the same thing just using a slightly different syntax.
For all intents and purposes, from an user's point of view, this project is as a waste of time as writing yet another scheme interpreter.