The notebooks were THE thing of Mathematica, at least to me. 12 years ago, as I was finishing my PhD in quantum optics, I wanted to migrate to the stack used in industry - and picked Python. Also, that way I was an early adopter of Jupyter Notebook, as it captured what was need + was open.

Now Mathematica notebooks (still remember, it is .nb) do not have the novelty factor. But they were the first to set a trend, which we now take for granted.

That said, I rarely use notebooks anymore. In the coding time, it is much easier to create scripts and ask to create a visualization in HTML.

> Closely followed by the interactive notebooks.

Mathematica's notebooks are the only environment where I can do some computation to arrive at a symbolic expression. Copy the expression from the output cell into a new input cell. Then manipulate it by hand into the form I want. Then continue processing it further.

Also, symbolic expressions can be written nicely with actual superscripts and subscripts, and with non-latin characters.

One of the best features of Mathematica system.

I disagree, the language itself is one of the more elegant parts of the system, and enables a lot of the rest of the elegance.

From a purely programming language theory, it's pretty unique.

I once tried to find a language that had all the same properties, and I failed. The Factor language is probably the closest. But they are still pretty different.

First I believe there is no such thing as the Mathematica language, it's Wolframscript which is useful in a bunch of different applications. And second, if you don't have access to a $1000 / yr wolfram subscription, this would be the next best thing.