Matlab and Octave are both easier to do some basic numeric work for people (frequently engineering and science students) with only rudimentary programming exper

Matlab and Octave are both easier to do some basic numeric work for people (frequently engineering and science students) with only rudimentary programming experience. In undergrad you write very little code, but do a lot of plotting and it is helpful that the Matlab IDE has all of that natively builtin. I prefer Python & Julia now, but getting something like Matplotlib working with Python would've been more difficult for me in college. Also, Matlab has native support for matrices and numeric operations (inversion, transpose, solve) that students need without having to learn how to use something like Numpy. My preference depends a lot on whether I'm doing exploratory work or trying to craft high quality software to run in production.