Is Mathematica Programming Language worth it?

In my opinion the Mathematica language is a very worthwhile to learn. Obviously it helps you use Mathematica better. But it also teaches you a lot about programming: Mathematica emphasizes many important aspects of programming that are left behind or impossible in traditional "procedural" languages like Java, C/++/#, etc: * It's a natively functional language - Lots of languages have some functional capability "bolted on" these days, but you will learn a lot by using a language designed to support functional programming from the beginning - It's "multi-paradigm" actually, in the sense it also supports procedural and other styles as well as functional * It's a "symbolic" language with unique pattern matching style of declaring functions and transforming expressions * It's "homoiconic" (like languages such as lisp), meaning the fundamental data type of the language (tree-structured "symbolic expression") is the same representation as the code of the language itself. - This means you can make a Mathematica program that generates other Mathematica programs (or even parts of itself!) very easily. Extremely powerful. * It's definitely suitable for applications large and small. - Like Java, Flash, etc, the Mathematica language has a "runtime engine". It is called CDF Player: http://www.wolfram.com/cdf-player/. - For 1000s of mini-apps (sometimes only one line of code) written by people like you, see e.g. http://demonstrations.wolfram.com. The full source code is there for all of them too. - For large, think of the Wolfram|Alpha website! http://www.wolframalpha.com. Almost entirely written in Mathematica language.