I have to generally agree here, although my experience has mostly been with Wolfram Alpha. I'm continually amazed at how easily it lets me grapple with optimiz

I have to generally agree here, although my experience has mostly been with Wolfram Alpha. I'm continually amazed at how easily it lets me grapple with optimization problems or solving for different variables (when I barely remember how to do them myself). However, Mathematica has always felt a bit niche to me. I wish it was more of an open source project like Octave, because I think the approach is awesome but too often I feel constrained by Wolfram's way of looking at things. If I could combine Matlab, Go, Python, Mathematica, Excel and (yikes) php for it's hands-on-get-@#!$-done-facility, that would be my ideal language.