>>6
Mathematica seems to have a focus on symbolic math
You mean math?
Also Mathematica's syntax is fuqed and unintuitive.
It's extremely intuitive. Just because you don't understand functional programming doesn't mean it's bad or unintuitive.
MATLAB on the other hand seems like the kind of language that started as a cute side-project for a little data analysis. However then some of the devs friends caught wind of it and decided to add a few features, and then this kept happening until it became the unholy garbage it is today. Honestly, what kind of use is it when it's supposedly a modelling language that you can't compile to run on a DSP and doesn't have any math capabilities. It's an imperative language that offers nothing but what seems like hacks upon hacks to do the most trivial of tasks. It's not fast, but not slow either. The library of functionality it comes with is average at best and it doesn't interoperate with anything except the few devices actually designed to interface with it. It's basically an overpriced glob of ENTERPRISE QUALITY language that's only used because it's past the immortality point and taught in schools; and as an extension of that, because most engineers are shit at programming and don't know any better.
And I bet you use perforce too.