Comment by fluidcruft

Mostly what's going on with Matlab in the wild is that it costs at least $10k a seat as soon as you are no longer at an academic institution.

Yes, there is Octave but often the toolboxes aren't available or compatible so you're rewriting everything anyway. And when you start rewriting things for Octave you learn/remember what trash Matlab actually is as a language or how big a pain doing anything that isn't what Mathworks expects actually is.

To be fair: Octave has extended Matlab's syntax with amazing improvements (many inspired by numpy and R). It really makes me angry that Mathworks hasn't stolen Octave's innovations and I hate every minute of not being able to broadcast and having to manually create temp variables because you can't chain indexing whenever I have to touch actual Matlab. So to be clear Octave is somewhat pleasant and for pure numerical syntax superior to numpy.

But the siren call of Python is significant. Python is not the perfect language (for anything really) but it is a better-than-good language for almost everything and it's old enough and used by so many people that someone has usually scratched what's itching already. Matlab's toolboxes can't compete with that.