Yeah, the Mathematica language is the least interesting aspect of the Mathematica system. Closely followed by the interactive notebooks.

The notebooks were THE thing of Mathematica, at least to me. 12 years ago, as I was finishing my PhD in quantum optics, I wanted to migrate to the stack used in industry - and picked Python. Also, that way I was an early adopter of Jupyter Notebook, as it captured what was need + was open.

Now Mathematica notebooks (still remember, it is .nb) do not have the novelty factor. But they were the first to set a trend, which we now take for granted.

That said, I rarely use notebooks anymore. In the coding time, it is much easier to create scripts and ask to create a visualization in HTML.

> Closely followed by the interactive notebooks.

Mathematica's notebooks are the only environment where I can do some computation to arrive at a symbolic expression. Copy the expression from the output cell into a new input cell. Then manipulate it by hand into the form I want. Then continue processing it further.

Also, symbolic expressions can be written nicely with actual superscripts and subscripts, and with non-latin characters.

One of the best features of Mathematica system.

I disagree, the language itself is one of the more elegant parts of the system, and enables a lot of the rest of the elegance.

From a purely programming language theory, it's pretty unique.

I once tried to find a language that had all the same properties, and I failed. The Factor language is probably the closest. But they are still pretty different.

First I believe there is no such thing as the Mathematica language, it's Wolframscript which is useful in a bunch of different applications. And second, if you don't have access to a $1000 / yr wolfram subscription, this would be the next best thing.