The only improvement could be to export the generated figures into excel so that we can make minor touchups manually.
I've tried all the rest. I've tried Julia. The tooling, my god, it is woeful. The famous Time To First Plot. I've tried Python. Doesn't hold a candle to Matlab for the ease with which you can manipulate matrices and vectors.
Matlab is far from perfect, but fuck it, it's an amazing tool for being productive.
That's what I liked so much about matlab. You could generate figures programmatically and set the fonts and lines styles and whatnot, and then could just nudge stuff around in the figure if it wasn't how you wanted (plus retrieve that info).
The rest of the language and the platform though? Awful.
I saw people getting into make real applications, using the gui functionality and whatnot, it never felt like the right tool for something like that.
You never know if the script you send someone will work right, because everyone has different toolbox options, and everything is in the global namespace. It has some OOP features bolted on to it, but it always looked worse than Perl5.
The core language is straight out of the mid-80s. The only real upgrade it got was it can finally broadcast matrix dimensions. Before that, you had people trying to 'vectorize' their code with 'repmat'.
Despite all of its shortcomings, especially with packaging, I'll take scientific python over that any day.