Jerzy Karczmarczuk
Syntax for 3D arrays? Give me one single language where this is natural and immediate.
I can think of 3: Mathematica, Maple and APL.
But I hope you don't try to convince us that Mathematica is good at number crunching...
For linear algebra, Maple, Mathematica and Matlab all use ATLAS and hardware BLAS (when available). For IVP ODEs, the author of the underlying numerical solver for Matlab and Maple are lead by the same person (Larry Shampine); he has publicly stated that he thinks the one for Maple representes the state-of-the-art [mostly because of access to symbolic differentiation], with the one in Matlab being just a bit behind. Furthermore, for 'structured' matrices (including sparse), there are simple examples where both Mathematica and Maple are arbitrarily faster than Matlab on LU and QR decompositions, as well as Eigenvalue computations. While Mathematica and Maple used to be pathetic at numeric computations, that has changed a lot in the last 5 years. Jacques