I know this question is old, and therefore may no longer be
watched, but I felt it was necessary to comment. As an
aerospace engineer at Georgia Tech, I can say, with no
qualms, that MATLAB is awesome. You can have it quickly
interface with your Excel spreadsheets to pull in data about
how high and fast rockets are flying, how the wind affects
those same rockets, and how different engines matter. Beyond
rocketry, similar concepts come into play for cars, trucks,
aircraft, spacecraft, and even athletics. You can pull in
large amounts of data, manipulate all of it, and make sure
your results are as they should be. In the event something is
off, you can add a line break where an error occurs to debug
your program without having to recompile every time you want
to run your program. Is it slower than some other programs?
Well, technically. I'm sure if you want to do the number
crunching it's great for on an NVIDIA graphics processor, it
would probably be faster, but it requires a lot more effort
with harder debugging.
As a general programming language, MATLAB is weak. It's not
meant to work against Python, Java, ActionScript, C/C++ or
any other general purpose language. It's meant for the
engineering and mathematics niche the name implies, and it
does so fantastically.