The most important thing that sets Mathematica apart from the other tools is its ability to do symbolic math. Mathematica comes into its own once you start to use it for what it is: an impure functional programming language. Often times, beginning Mathematica users will try to do imperative-style programming (with For and While loops etc) in Mathematica, and the result is invariably bad and slow. To some extent, they are right Matlab's language is easier to learn Mathematica's language has a bunch of complicated features (pattern matching emphasis on functional-style programming), that are powerful, but take a lot of time to get used to and use properly.
It is used a lot less than Matlab many potential users see it as a "harder to use" Matlab. Main disadvantage is that some packages (like Simulink) have no Python equivalent as of now. The advantage in my opinion is that it is a sane programming language, unlike Matlab. Python is free and (together with adding like matplotlib, Jupiter, numpy. It cannot do serious symbolic math, only numerical math. It can do matrix manipulations and graphics okay-ish, but really its programming language sucks donkey balls. Still, it has a large installed base and many users who use it a lot, mostly because it's been around for like forever. Matlab is expensive, and some often-used functionality cost extra money (eg Simulink). If you find yourself making enormous spreadsheets, you're using the wrong tool for the job. I have seen people use Excel beyond what it's good for. Still, as a working engineer, some of your work will be not complicated, and the advantage of Excel is that you can share it with everyone, since it is pretty safe to assume that anyone (also non technical people) have access to it. Mathematica, Excel and Python are useful tools in their own right (I would add Matlab to that since it is often used in engineering), and sure they do have overlap, but there are important differences:Įxcel is just a spreadsheet, it is not suited for anything complicated.
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