It's also really quite good for automating numerical calculations; a sort of poor-man's-Matlab. Having every intermediate value in a multi-step computation both

It's also really quite good for automating numerical calculations; a sort of poor-man's-Matlab. Having every intermediate value in a multi-step computation both immediately visualized (and thus easily sanity-checked) and accessible as a variable, without having to keep track of names, is very powerful.