Complete agreement - grad students have a few jobs they need to do and need to do quickly: 1) Large (within reason) easy matrix manipulations. MATLAB is fanta

Complete agreement - grad students have a few jobs they need to do and need to do quickly: 1) Large (within reason) easy matrix manipulations. MATLAB is fantastic at this. Matrices as first-class objects is so important, I don't know why more languages don't include them (though I am pleasantly unaware of the complications inherent to this). 2) Simple, decently pretty visualizations of data. 3) Trivial syntax. If you've programmed at all, it's easy to read MATLAB syntax. IMO, the only threat to MATLAB on the horizon for academic work is Python + the associated SciPy tools (sckikit-learn, etc); especially as bundled in SPYDER, which I have had a blast with. But since cost is typically not an issue at a university (MATLAB is paid for by someone else), and everyone already speaks MATLAB, there's not a real impetus to change. (Julia may be int he running, too, but SPYDER seems more user friendly at this point) Also, as someone who's been through this a dozen times before - as soon as a professor says "make me this visualization, the command in MATLAB is this" and the grad student says "SciPy (or whatever) doesn't have that", that student is converting his data to a text file, reading it into MATLAB, and making that damn plot :)