People who think MATLAB is worth my time are not worth my time.

Matlab is pretty good if your algorithms are math-heavy. You can develop quickly and check out what works with real data. If need be, you can pick another language for actual implementation later, once you know the algos actually work. I did that in a project where I prototyped in Matlab and implemented in assembly.

@Fast-Nop I dunno, Python is just as good at prototyping and has much nicer syntax and tooling.
I never actually felt the need to open my MATLAB install.
Except for a few corner cases like MATLAB's HDL compiler.

@Fast-Nop I use R for this