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I think the pitch is that F# is halfway to Matlab without losing general programming power — a best of both worlds kind of thing.

Yeah, Matlab seems to be pretty useless if you want to do anything besides pure math.

I mean, that's really all computers are at the core- math- but you know what I mean.

At their core, computers are boolean logic, not arithmetic. Ironically, math is one of the things they are bad at, they are just quick.

I'd say computers are more applied math than pure math

Mathematica is more oriented towards pure maths (e.g. symbolic maniplation) and MATLAB more towards applied (numerical methods).