At the moment, the biggest challenger to Matlab is definately Python. The two choices have different strengths and weaknesses. Matlab has had a lot of work do

At the moment, the biggest challenger to Matlab is definately Python. The two choices have different strengths and weaknesses. Matlab has had a lot of work done on providing specialised modules to do the heavy lifting for signal processing, simulations, etc. If your work is very heavily oriented towards theory, it's probably the best fit. Python on the other hand is a general purpose programming language. If you are doing real-world work, Python will greatly simplify the task of reading in data, and getting it into a format that you can do mathematical analysis on. Getting data off a server, for example, or changing the format of data is much simpler in Python than it is in Matlab. The mathematical analysis side of things isn't as developed, and even when the modules exist, the documentation is often lacking. So really it depends on what kind of work you are trying to do. These days I find Python's maths support good enough that I rarely miss the sorts of things you can find in Matlab, but then I am generally doing real world stuff, interfacing to weird systems, and looking for decent performance. Someone doing more theoretical research may prefer the more flexible mathematical tools available in Matlab.