According to Wikipedia, Maple and Mathcad started only a couple years apart (late 80's), so one could argue that both wheels were developed in parallel. They seemed to have gone in slightly different directions at first, but one made a big step back a few years ago, and the other tries now to increase its market shares by improving its product in the direction of both customer bases' requirements.
For a lot of things, I would agree that this new language is redundant with what Maple and Mathcad have to offer (and even less powerful, as I doubt it does symbolics), but for some very specific applications, it might be actuelly much better.
I do embedded software to control the electronic I design. In my previous company, I designed a simulation package, in C, to simulate both my electronics and the code I would program the microcontrolers with. I don't know if it would be possible to do so in Maple or Mathcad, but I seriously doubt it (and it would probably be a lot more difficult).
Maybe for application mixing software and hardware, having such a programming language can be actually better than regular engineering packages such as Maple and Mathcad...
