[c7b]

My impression is that 10 years ago, Matlab had a few things going for it in terms of plotting, general usability,... that made it a valid competitor for eg R, even if you didn't depend on some of its more unique features like Simulink. Nowadays, I consider it essentially legacy. R has pulled so far ahead in terms of plotting/data manipulation/apps that it would be a no-brainer even if there was no price difference. What used to be a Matlab-R choice is now an R-Python choice, maybe Julia. I happen to have to maintain a fairly large Matlab codebase, if we were to start over it'd definitely be one of those, probably R. I still like the Matlab IDE best, but that's not going to keep me. The most annoying thing is that you have to buy another license on top of the regular one for most interesting things (even the optimization toolbox costs extra, so does statistics, ML, DL - and they're still no match for R or Python).