[drunkpotato]

Thank you, that's a good list! Dealing with cell arrays and text vs. numerics is why I do my pre-processing in Python. Matlab's job is to read in the data, run it through various algorithms, collect accuracy statistics, and show plots.

For us the issue is not so much Matlab as a programming language, but rather availability of new algorithms and ease of parallel processing. The licensing issues involved in getting the parallel toolbox running on multiple workstations seems like a headache, which is part of what is motivating us to look at R.