I think the reason Mathematica hasn't "caught on" is that it doesn't look like fortran/matlab type programming that scientists/engineers are more traditionally exposed to. I find that if I'm trying to write an explicit loop (as opposed to a map or vector operation) in Mathematica I am most likely doing something wrong.
You'll drive yourself crazy trying to understand subscripts as a beginner, I would advise against getting too fancy with them unless you are fairly advanced. They work reasonably transparently in most cases, but there are a handful of situations where they are really frustrating (e.g. in With/Module/Block constructs). You can actually use them as symbols if you import the Symbolize package and Symbolize them, but then you lose the ability to "do math" to the subscript (e.g. you won't be able to use Table[] won't generate the symbolized variables.)
You'll drive yourself crazy trying to understand subscripts as a beginner, I would advise against getting too fancy with them unless you are fairly advanced. They work reasonably transparently in most cases, but there are a handful of situations where they are really frustrating (e.g. in With/Module/Block constructs). You can actually use them as symbols if you import the Symbolize package and Symbolize them, but then you lose the ability to "do math" to the subscript (e.g. you won't be able to use Table[] won't generate the symbolized variables.)