Matlab has a more interesting dispatch model than python though. (Mathematica has even better dispatch but I haven't used it in almost 20 years at this point) Julia's model is even better, but I just never have time to dig into it deeply enough to get to the zen of Julia. One day when I have time to understand Julia I'd like to, but it's hard to compete with the reliability of python just always working.
What is dispatch in this context? Function call polymorphism?
Aside: I wasn't a big fan of the Mathematica language so I wrote "PyML" a looooong time ago- it turned unevaluated Python expressions into Mathematica, transmitted them via MathLink to be evaluated the Mathematica kernel, and then the results were send back and converted to a Python expression. This was long before sympy. It never went anywhere (I found ways to simply not depend on Mathematica).
Yes, function call polymorphism. Especially combined with Mathematica's piecewise syntax. I didn't really use it for numerics, it was more for Lisp/Prolog type things. I was always impressed at how short and readable the Mathematica code ended up being. I used to use Mathematica quite a bit to generate C++ functions.
But it's a very different use case than Matlab. One of the things I like about python is it isn't too bad for sliding between lispy/functional modes for some things and more lapacky things elsewhere. Matlab has a better syntax for the lapack parts but trying to do anything functional gets really annoying and very, very slow. But still I would say Mathematica has the best pure math syntax for those sorts of things. I don't have any experience with sympy, I should probably check it out.
Mathematica is nothing less than a work of art. I dedicated a fair amount of time to become proficient, but it never solved the use case I had (find derivatives for complicated functions- this was before autodiff was common).
Unfortunately, Wolfram himself has made a number of decisions that greatly limited its applicability and so it will always be niche.
