I guess the mental block I have with Wolfram/Mathematica is that there's this feeling that you don't know how to do it until you know how to do it. As opposed to languages where you can learn a smaller number of principles and then use those principles to reason your way to how to do it.

Like, the third slide of the introduction:

Range[20]

Why not just something like List[1..20] ? Maybe List[1..20] works in Wolfram, but then it's weird that you have this Range function that serves no other purpose than to define a Range.

Same with NestList[f, x, 5]. I don't offhand know the way to create its output in something like Scala or Haskell but I imagine it's pretty concise, but meanwhile, in this case... if it's possible to get the effect without using NestList, then why use it? And if it's not possible to get the effect without using NestList, then how would you ever find out that you can use NestList?

It just seems like the actual programming experience would be a lot more about hunting-and-pecking through documentation and google searches, rather than reasoning your way to solution.

I'd love to hear from someone skilled with Wolfram to offer some clarity. Are you just basically thumbing through the documentation all the time to find that one perfect function call?