When people speak of "symbolic computation" in the context of mathematica, it's usually not about the Mathematica programming language itself, but rather about

When people speak of "symbolic computation" in the context of mathematica, it's usually not about the Mathematica programming language itself, but rather about using Mathematica to do symbolical mathematics. A bit like how you did math with pen and paper in high school or university, except having Mathematica do all the hard stuff.