I don't really understand the point of the Wolfram Language. It feels like a language with a humongous standard library that tries to cover everything?
> The Wolfram Language is first and foremost an evolution of the symbolic language developed for Mathematica over the course of more than 25 years. But it's considerably more than that—adding the knowledge, knowledge representation and natural language abilities of Wolfram|Alpha, as well as a new symbolic deployment mechanism created with the Wolfram Cloud.
This is followed by a "Buzzword Compliance" section, which lives up to its name, but describes some of the features of the language
It can easily express things like associative and commutative operators (esp. useful if you have a pattern that matches on a use of that operator), and alternate evaluation orders (outside-in, mixed, lazy, held, &c). These are hard to trivially implement w/o very different kind of interpreter.
In this sense, most Lisp implementations pick a static evaluation strategy and leave implementing alternatives to a metainterpreter, which isn't exactly what's happening in Mathematica.