Mathematica is also incredibly well documented both online and within the program itself. The program supplied documentation and help is actually useful, something which is unfortunately not common in computing.

I'm not familiar with your commenting style. Is this straight up or dripping with sarcasm?

Serious. Super serious.

No, really, Mathematica is great. It can do some amazing things and it's really easy to write reusable code for.

What advice or pointers would you give to start learning & using mma for real problems?

I tried to learn it a few times and it worked great for toy problems, but when I tried to write an entire script a la python/c/matlab, I failed miserably

My favorite example. The chosen answer to the "Where's Waldo?" solution is 7 lines long. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8479058/how-do-i-find-wal...

The solution is basically a cross correlation in a colour channel between the image and a zebra pattern. That can be done in a few lines in more than one language.

Also, 7 lines is hardly a good metric to judge the general effectiveness of an environment or language.