Well if you're looking for anecdotal evidence: my last hobby project (OCR for a specific book+script), I used Mathematica to prototype (fast iteration) and C++

Well if you're looking for anecdotal evidence: my last hobby project (OCR for a specific book+script), I used Mathematica to prototype (fast iteration) and C++ with OpenCV to implement it (way faster execution). I started the project in Python but switched because it wasn't particularly good at anything vs. the combination of Mathematica and C++. Actually I prototyped it in C++ too before doing some extra analysis in Mathematica only because it had some algorithms that OpenCV didn't.