[Prcmaker]

I learned real Matlab using project Euler in my first year of uni. I'd been taught it previously as 'just a calculator', but working through the problems opened up a world of skills I knew nothing about. Those learnings pushed me in to microcontrollers and got me thinking outside the box in a way I still use regularly. I can't recommend it highly enough.

[kcexn]

MATLAB is such a peculiar language. Using it often reminds me of using Prolog, although MATLAB does a good job of hiding its esoteric nature.

Some of my early post-grad work was done in MATLAB and I remember having to find ways to collapse loops into matrix operations so that MATLAB could finish executing the programs in a reasonable amount of time.

I actually think somewhere in the MATLAB documentation it explains that all loop constructs in MATLAB are compiled into matrix operations by the interpreter before MATLAB executed anything.

Which is why MATLAB is so often orders of magnitude slower than Python even though they're supposed to be able to solve similar problems. The idiomatic MATLAB way of writing programs just requires a very matrix-y view of the world.

[Prcmaker]

I rarely found the bottleneck of Matlabs inefficiency to be a major issue with my work, and found the speed to get analysis started and finished a great benefit. I've used a lot of more 'real' programming languages when the need has arisen, but for day to day quickly crunching numbers, matlab (or octave, now) has been indispensable. I'd love to have the time to develop a good basis for numerical analysis in python, but the learning curve is a hard sell for myself when I've got a tool I'm comfortable with.

[cozzyd]

I mean numpy is basically MATLAB for Python...