A personal anecdote, yesterday I was thinking about using Maxima versus R (using rstudio) for a three session of 1.5 hours (total 4.5 hours) to cover statistics and probability. Using dice = sample(1:6,100,rep=T) and table(dice) you hit a wall, there isn't an intuitive way to extract the counts, and you need something like as.data.frame(table(dice))$freq, which I don't like. Maxima use ":" for assignment, R can use "=" or "<-". I would like to see "<-" as a general symbol for assignment and using "=" in maxima and R for other uses like equations and default parameters. I prefer seq(1,10) or 1:10 to makelist(i,i,1,10). What I am trying to communicate is that all those open source projects use different syntaxes and that is not a good design for users. Mathematica wins in this field because it unifies the syntax. But Maxima and R are both inspired by Lisp, and Julia has also some macro capabilities. If someone is able to unify the syntax it would be great. We have data.frames and data.tables and non standard evaluation and a lot of concepts that to be useful must be framed in a common context, otherwise we are doomed to a babel tower, or in more practical terms, users are going to choose propietary software because it is designed to make them productive. Python with numpy and pandas is another option but for 4.5 hours I prefer the simplicity of lm(y ~ x) to create a linear model model to other options. I don't know if a smooth transition can be established between a simple language (rich context) and a general one.