Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lets say you want to build some fancy DIY project, like a food dehydrator. You want to make some mathematical models of the thing, so you pull up Mathematica. To start with, maybe you want to solve some simple mass and energy balances on the thing to find out how much power it will take, and how long it will need to run. No problem, Mathematica does basic algebra right out of the box. It's also got a nice units syste…
This describes well how I use Mathematica. I would also add that compared to Matlab you pay for single license and get whole thing. With Matlab you send list of toolboxes to a manager and got asked "Do you really need symbolic toolbox?" With tools maturing there is a push to use Python for prototyping, but the experience is still not as seamless as with Mathematica. That being said, from my experience Mathematica is…
Performance is the other issue. Mathematica is no slouch, but it can be tough to figure out how to improve things if you need more speed.