No joke, scientists from Canada. I'm a Mathemstica fan myself, but among scientists from Canada the Maple/Mathematica split seems roughly 50/50. I'm guessing it is popular in Canadian Univerisities.

I haven't used maple for many years, but unless something's changed it's not in the same domain as matlab/octave/numpy.

When I was in CEGEP (2 years of pre-university basic science and general ed college, specific to Quebec), we used maple for exploratory symbolic and plotting kind of work in math classes (calculus and lin alg).

In university (engineering school) they taught us MATLAB in the two required introductory programming classes. In grad school I took an advanced numerical methods class where the prof was actually cool enough to let us use whatever language we wanted. I took the opportunity to learn python/numpy.

maple plays more in Mathematica's niche than in matlab's.