Webel: Mathematica is functional programming on steroids (and has nearly everything else, except for decent in-built OO support, although you can make some progress with Abstract Data Types and even some inheritance).

I've sometimes worked on projects together with punters who are new to functional programming and allergic to mathematics, many of whom have particularly strong and irrational opinions about Mathematica not being as powerful as their latest toy language (the one they want a tick for on their CV), especially when they have not even used Mathematica ... and given they are allergic to maths.

I won't mention any specific coding languages, but Mathematica walks all over them as far as functional is concerned. They don't even come close. They aren't even in the same universe.

BTW, I'm not sure that being "on steroids" is a good idea, maybe I need a better idiom.

But maybe Wolfram Research has taken too many functional steroids. Maybe their apparent long term allergy to decent industrial strength, vendor-supported, fully documented object-orientation is due to functional addiction!

Functional does not suck, object-oriented does not suck, living without both of them at the same time (playing nicely together) does. If I were a politician I'd say something about babies getting thrown out with the bath-water, but I'm not, so I won't.