The programming language in Matlab is not very good. The main advantages of Matlab is that is has so many built in functions and great plotting tools. There are

The programming language in Matlab is not very good. The main advantages of Matlab is that is has so many built in functions and great plotting tools. There are a lot of plugins too (often commercial). Matlab is also not open source and rather expensive. There is GNU Octave which is free and mostly compatible with Matlab.