I wrote in detail why I think MATLAB is a bad choice for scientific research here. Imagine my surprise when I saw a letter about the "new MATLAB licensing model" from my university in my inbox. Just some quotes translated into English:
Further notes for MATLAB users at the TU Ilmenau:
1. Close MATLAB if you do not use it for a longer period of time (longer than 30 minutes), to free the license for other users. Forgo to block a academic-license by doing pseudo calculations.
…
4. Examine the use of comparable commercial or free software in your department like Maple, Mathematica, R, Octave or Scilab.
Sadly they forget to mention Python/NumPy. Maybe I should offer an introduction course…