The advantage with MATLAB/Octave is that a lot of signal processing code has already been written in it. As you write more complex DSP code, you'll get stuck so

The advantage with MATLAB/Octave is that a lot of signal processing code has already been written in it. As you write more complex DSP code, you'll get stuck somewhere and chances are someone has already coded up that application on MATLAB central or on their blog. I took a Speech Processing class and opted to write code in Python. I probably spent 1.5x the time the others spent. Most DSP texts today have MATLAB code. It might be a good exercise to implement the functions from scratch but I think it is better to focus on the theory and not waste time coding up something like Overlap-add.