Mathematica borrows a lot of good ideas from many languages and paradigms. But programming languages are a spectrum: whatever you consider "good", there is usua

Mathematica borrows a lot of good ideas from many languages and paradigms. But programming languages are a spectrum: whatever you consider "good", there is usually something "better" slightly above it, you just might now know about it yet (the Blub Paradox). Moving from Clojure to Mathematica/Wolfram is a huge downgrade as far as data structures are concerned. And associations are a particularly big failure.