Matlab is awesome. I had to learn it for a class in Computational Photography back in school. The matrix-centric language design is an interesting change from traditional languages and the amazing linear solvers available give you a shocking amount of power sometimes. For example, the language has really good SIMD/parallelism support out of the box, because you are steered towards making all of your variables into vectors and performing batch processing. Backslash is also an incredibly powerful tool in the right hands, and lends itself to some beautiful oneliners (it’s sort of like a shell language in that way).
