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Comment by jfarmer | Hacker News Reader

It's a programming language and an associated IDE for doing mathematical and scientific computing. It is similar to Matlab in some ways, although Matlab has a strong "numerical" flavor and Mathematica has a strong "symbolic" flavor.

As a language it use an M-expression-like syntax. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-expression

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I believe its IDE was also the first widely used one to take the "mathematical notebook" approach where you can sort of free-form arrange formulas on a page and link them to each other. Unless I'm mistaken, at the time the other computer-algebra systems (Macsyma, Maple, etc.) all used REPL style sequential interfaces. I mostly prefer the REPL interfaces myself, but a lot of people like the notebook style, and I think Mathematica's approach to that has been influential on some recent open-source interfaces like Sage Notebook and iPython Notebook.

MathCAD[1] was the first to use the notebook approach. It was/is a neat application, more along the lines of Matlab than a CAS like Mathematica.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathcad

Weirdly, Mathematica integrated support for high-performance numerical linear algebra libraries from Intel and others a couple years before MATLAB did.

So your point about symbolic versus numeric flavor might have been correct prior to version 6, but it is no longer true (Mathematica 10 will be released later this year). In fact, they now use many of the same libraries for pure numeric work.

Numeric (as well as hybrid numeric+symbolic) computation is possible in Mathematica. In MATLAB, symbolic math requires a clunky add-on that is far from competitive with what Mathematica can do.

I work at Wolfram.

Neat! I haven't used Mathematica regularly since 2006-or-so, when I was studying mathematics at the University of Chicago.

If memory serves, 5.2 was the then-current version. It's an amazing piece of software.

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