Bah. Each time this comes up, people are quick to bash on Matlab. I won't stand for it. Matlab is not many things. It is certainly not all things to all men. But it is Fucking. Productive. for the kinds of quick numerical analyses that engineers often have to do. There is a function for everything and the kitchen sink, the syntax is simple as hell, there is a real IDE, and it gets out of your way.

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.