> The most important feature of Mathematica is that it is functional and not object-oriented.
Python has object-oriented features but there is nothing that requires you to use them; you certainly don't have to express every Python program in terms of classes and methods, the way you do in Java. Doing functional programming in Python is common. Is there a particular aspect of doing functional programming in Python that you find to be a roadblock?
It's more of the fact that all popular scientific libraries in python are written in an object-oriented way. That kind of forces you to write your own code in an OO way. I am guilty of this as I am writing a library myself. But users have to use, say numpy, along with my library. It would be suboptimal to force the user to constantly switch between functional and OO, so now my library is OO.
On the other hand, all the code I wrote in Mathematica during my PhD was functional, because it is just easier to write functional in Mathematica.
> It's more of the fact that all popular scientific libraries in python are written in an object-oriented way. That kind of forces you to write your own code in an OO way.
I'm not sure I see why. The object orientation in libraries like numpy or scipy is to provide the user with fast implementations of the kinds of mathematical objects they will need to do computations. But unless you are defining additional such objects in your own code, there's no reason why your own code needs to be object oriented. You can just write ordinary functional programs that use the mathematical objects the library provides.
For example, say you are doing matrix computations. You are of course going to use the matrix objects provided by the library; but your own code shouldn't need to define any new matrix objects. Your own code can just be straightforward computations using the existing matrix objects in the library.
It doesn't matter how libraries are written, in py you can use in functional way. I don't get what do you mean by forcing you to code in OO? I Had used pandas, scikit-learn, numpy, pytorch in production and I had never wrote them in OO way. Are we from same universe?
Python has object-oriented features but there is nothing that requires you to use them; you certainly don't have to express every Python program in terms of classes and methods, the way you do in Java. Doing functional programming in Python is common. Is there a particular aspect of doing functional programming in Python that you find to be a roadblock?