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by paulgb 5121 days ago
Have you used Sage? It's not as tight as Mathmatica, but it's pretty solid and easy to jump in if you know python.
1 comments

At university in the "signal processing" lecture, I solved all exercises in Python while most students used MatLab (which was recommended by the lecturer). I just did it because I like Python, and expected my solutions to be clumsier and more "lowlevel". But when we compared our programs, I was surprised that MatLab didn't offer any more useful building blocks (libraries/functions) than Python, at least for our tasks at hand. And the Python code was quite clear, but that's probably a matter of taste.

If it's about programming and math, Python really plays its strengths: Clean syntax, functional programming features, numpy, sympy, linalg, etc.

Julia looks promising as a Matlab replacement: http://julialang.org/
And JavaScript is looking good for casual numerical analysis, mostly because you can very easily create UIs with dynamic plots that you can publish.