I actually really like Mathematica as a tool for symbolic/mathematical stuff – they're the best at what they do best. But all this Wolfram Language stuff is just way overblown, and realistically a proprietary standard library – however huge – just can't compete with the open source ecosystems of Python and friends.

What really sets the Wolfram language apart is its gigantic library of functions. Want to look up stock quotes? easy. Weather? easy. Plus tons of other built in functions that would make a machine learning prediction of Coppertone suncreen's stock price based on weather forecast a couple of lines. In another language you'd have to set up the API queries yourself with a library, parse the returns with another library, and do the machine learning with another library. Then you'd have to cross your fingers and hope that an API or library update doesn't break your code. Wolfram promises easy access to clean data and much less heartache maintaining it.

Some of the drawbacks are that it is closed source, costs money (although cheap as far as this kind of software generally goes), but most importantly the succinct benefits of the language can make it painful to deal with. Yes, I can probably write 3 lines to do something that would take a 1/2 page of Python, but I first need to know which of thousands of functions to use and the eccentricities of the language. I'm sure Wolfram employees are that skilled, but I'm not and will not be anytime soon.

With that being said, I spent a few hours writing a notebook demonstrating key fundamental and scientific formulas in my industry this weekend. It was easy and the resulting code, pictures, and graphs look fantastic. I exported it as a PDF for others to use. Even the console is pretty cool. I think it would be a very popular language and environment if it was free and open source. Another problem is running something in production. My solution is to not even bother and just write the final solution in Julia if I need it. I think Mathematica really makes sense though if you're at a lab where everyone else uses it and can pass around Notebooks. In short I really like having it around, but don't like dealing with licensing issues.

In fact, I would argue that the only drawback with Mathematica is the fact that you become locked in. (whether or not you care about that is your prerogative.)

For context I work full time in an industry unrelated to software, and have kids and all the chaos that goes with them, so have relatively little time to devote to programming. I need something that 'just works'.

I've always felt that I should enjoy programming, and have had several false starts including HyperCard and Eiffel back in the day. But Mathematica / Wolfram Language is the first time programming has actually clicked.

There are various aspects to the Wolfram Language that make it work for me;

- The documentation is enormous, comprehensive and even editable and executable (desktop install). I haven't seen anything that comes close in any other language (Racket would probably be a distant second). In the snatches of time I have, all the information I need can be found using the F1 key, I don't have to waste time going to Stack Exchange and asking others for help

- The concept of everything being an M-expression makes the language very logical. Sub-expressions can themselves be evaluated and understood, larger expressions built out of smaller ones etc

- Lots of syntactic sugar IMO makes the M-Expressions more readable than Lisp S-Expressions, while retaining their usefulness in making code understandable

- Very powerful pattern matching and structural operations on expressions, which are great tools for manipulating expressions and extracting code or data

- Strong support for functional programming, which I find to be more enjoyable than procedural programming

- The language is symbolic, which often allows you to 'play' with programs and understand how they will work in an abstract way before using with real data. As a toy example you can literally fold an abstract function with abstract expressions, e.g. inputting Fold[f,x,{a,b,c,d}] returns f[f[f[f[x,a],b],c],d].

- a huge standard library built in, all working in a way that is remarkably consistent for such a wide diversity of domains, and a language that has been in development for 30+ years

- interactive notebook programming allows me to document my notes and progress along with the code

I did try a few FLOSS options primarily for access to their communities and also ease of deployment (e.g. F#, Clojure, Java) but haven't found anything comes close for my particular needs. I suspect that Racket would be the next best thing.

I think the Wolfram Language does suffer from the Lisp curse, in that it is sufficiently powerful and well documented that individual developers can go a long way without recourse to a community, which in turn hence hinders the establishment and growth of such communities.

I would strongly recommend spending some time learning the fundamentals of the language. My favourite resource is Paul Wellin's An Introduction to Programming with Mathematica (2013). I suspect a lot of the criticism of Mathematica comes from those who haven't learnt the fundamentals, and expect it to work like Python or Java etc, when in fact it is more like a cousin of Lisp.

My other gripe, more objective than the above, with Sage is the lack of good documentation. The documentation is certainly complete, but it is painful to read. Mathematica documentation is a treat to read. Every function has its own page with plenty of examples to show capabilities, and show relations to other functions.

With Sage I constantly have to search the web to how to do things, while in Mathematica, I rarely had to leave the inbuilt help.

One aspect I think Mathematica will excel in is code generation. Using symbolic constructs in a very high level language to generate constructs of a low-level language is much easier to do in Mathematica than basically any other language.

On a side note - Linus Torvalds thought naming his operating system "Linux" was too arrogant. I think it's pretty bad marketing to name your programming language after yourself, but then again, the same social conventions that apply to us regular human beings certainly don't apply to Stephen Wolfram.

Also nitpick but you can run Wolfram code without Mathematica directly using the Wolfram Engine.

Mathematica is the Wolfram Language plus a user interface similar to the Symbolics Dynamic Listener that acted as your command line front end. Jupyter Notebooks are quite similar since the idea of a scientist’s or engineer’s notebook where content is “live” is a pretty common one.