> tl;dr: The Wolfram Language is an ok 30-year-old language
I don't think it is just 'OK'. It is lispy, with a HEAVY emphasis on symbolic computation.
I have yet to see anything even remotely similar to it.
EDIT:
There's also the visualization aspect. Things like Jupyter (formerly iPython) come close, but still can't do things like render video.
If you don't want to read the article, there's this video: https://youtu.be/_P9HqHVPeik?t=67 (initial ego trip skipped)
>Things like Jupyter (formerly iPython) come close, but still can't do things like render video.
This isn't actually true, you can render video in the notebook with matplotlib, although it can be pretty cumbersome. We've been developing a library called HoloViews (http://ioam.github.io/holoviews/), which makes generating complex visualizations and animations in the notebook a breeze. We support video output, widgets, gifs etc.
The language agnostic Jupyter with its interactive notebook comes close to Mathematica's environment. http://jupyter.org/
Jupyter supports Python and other languages like Julia (https://github.com/JuliaLang/IJulia.jl ). I don't know if there are JS and Lua bindings but both would lend themself because of their first class functions and functional language features.
There's also the visualization aspect. Things like Jupyter (formerly iPython) come close, but still can't do things like render video. If you don't want to read the article, there's this video: https://youtu.be/_P9HqHVPeik?t=67 (initial ego trip skipped)
(Another edit: fix typo)