All anecdotes, but In my Chem degree we used MATLAB, as did all the (non software) engineers I knew. My brother is a physics PhD student in Zurich, he uses MATL

All anecdotes, but In my Chem degree we used MATLAB, as did all the (non software) engineers I knew. My brother is a physics PhD student in Zurich, he uses MATLAB almost exclusively. I think the universities use it for two reasons. Firstly, they’ve paid for the license and many proprietary add-ons, so they may as well use it. Secondly, MATLAB is a fast and safe playground for bright students who don’t know how to code. Teaching students to code well is too expensive (mainly in time). While I was working on my masters (comp chem) I encountered a bottleneck written by a previous masters student. This was a python library. The student had written all his numerical methods manually. He was using python lists for vectors. His algorithms were great though. If you just use MATLAB, no one is making that mistake.