[programnature]

People into traditional programming languages look at Mathematica and see abstractions for which they see no purpose.

People into PL research look at Mathematica and scoff at its low-brow, for-the-masses term rewriting, lacking whatever theoretical property deemed "essential" that week.

Yet somehow the language has formalized and made more computable and consistent more domains of math, science, and increasingly data than any other.

There is no honor or glory in purposeful ignorance.

[reikonomusha]

I disagree that it has made more domains of math computable and consistent. It's syntax is consistent, but it's evaluation semantics is wildly inconsistent. This is noticeable when you use some of their internal simplification algorithms on non-trivial problem.

I think Axiom covered more surface area in terms of mathematics than Mathematica. Mathematica is mostly good at performing over reals and complexes and doing term-rewriting algebra. Axiom supported arbitrary algebraic structures.