I agree. Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha are amazing because of how close they get to maths as it is taught in school, uni and through books.

There are many other ways of working with maths. Graphing calculators are very common, and some models even have proper algebra support. There are also the likes of Matlab, R, Python + numpy, and obviously the addition of Jupyter notebooks.

“Mathematica®-compatible syntax and functions” seems to be the main selling point of Mathics. I presume that this means that I can copy-paste Mathematica examples I find online or that are shared with my by someone else.