[ktpsns]

Matlab inspired the scilab ecosystem, which is based on numpy, scipy, matplotlib, pandas. This was a major driver for the data science industry for a decade before AI kicked in and tensorflow, etc. was also built ontop of these libraries.

While I personally try to avoid contemporary matlab at any cost, the open source ecosystem is great and matlab would be my go-to tool if they would not exist.

[cdavid]

scilab is not based on numpy/etc. However, matlab was certainly an inspiration for the scientific python stack in early 2000s. I myself started contributing to numpy and matplotlib by adding missing features I needed to move away from matlab in 2006 or so.