Stanislav, Seltser, Petacube agree with Jake. Matlab still has some unique features to it which many open source projects (eg python) don't have - eg FPGA integration, System Modeling and Simulation. Combine that with decent language, nice debugger and many strong industry-specific solutions its good bet its will be around for a while. The reasons people dump matlab is not that its overpriced but due to the lack of integration with big data systems and the fact that matlab license cost at large scale becomes untenable.Plus number of industries using these unique matlab features is relatively small.