Since my first exposure was to Matlab/Scilab, I felt like my initial interactions with Mathematica were like trying to bang my head against a wall. Over the la

Since my first exposure was to Matlab/Scilab, I felt like my initial interactions with Mathematica were like trying to bang my head against a wall. Over the last year, as I incidentally got interested in Haskell and Lambda calculus, it dawned on my that Mathematica's language is built for functional programming. It felt like I'd just managed to find the light-switch. Now that I understand, it all makes sense when somebody says that all Mathematica essentially does is search and replace. I think this is in the spirit of a model of computation called [Markov algorithms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_algorithm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_algorithm).