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If visualization is required Matlab with the financial toolbox is a winner before the competition began.

Actually the only non perfect side of matlab is pricing. It also has the best help ever devised in history of cs. U can build a math PhD. Curriculum from matlab help pages.

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I think R is better at visualization than Matlab. Ggplot2 and Lattice are very good and base R plots are still very capable.

well Matlab cannot read compressed CSV files, a problem when uncompressed files are very large. And it is very slow as the article showed. But visualisation. Please, R with ggplot is miles ahead of Matlab.

Personally, I can't stand the grammar of graphics approach to plotting. But leaving that aside, the last time I tried ggplot, it lacked tons of features that matlab plotting has. For instance

- zoom and pan

- Data cursor/data tip.

- Export data under cursor to a workspace variable

- Interactive editing of the plot, with code export.

Zoom/pan and data tips should be table stakes for a plotting package. A package that doesn't support that is not fit for use. IMO.

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