Perl had tons of awesome libraries. Yet Python, Ruby, and Go, which had virtually none compared to Perl when they started still became very popular, and are arguably more popular than Perl now.
Incredible libraries, yes. But you may want to check out python with numpy, scipy, pandas, scikit-learn, etc. There are bundles like python (x,y) that bring them all together. Probably still want to stick with python 2.7 though (as most of scientific computing still does). This removes the tedious stumbling block that is forced unicode.
People take the internet way too seriously :/
>Apparently people are pretty polarized about Matlab
Yes, very much so. Much of the contention comes from the obscene licensing prices coupled with the fact that its a terrible language.