This has definitely been changing for a while. All engineering studies of my old university except for computer science and mathematics have switched from Java+Matlab to Python over the last years. I've already seen this have an effect on workplaces, where new students prefer to use Python and are generally allowed to.
I'd love to witness this. I used Matlab heavily as an engineering student, and now mostly work in Python. Python is definitely better for complex programming, but where the program is simple and the math is hard, Matlab seems like a great tool.
I'm curious what tools/libraries python users now use that brings Python up to the usability of matlab?
95% SciPy, NumPy and Spyder. I'm sure the massive savings on license costs also make it attractive.
I remember shelling out $60 for a true license of Matlab while in college. I remember thinking, "well you're an engineer now, and this cost is part of that", even thugh it felt like a small fortune. But official licensed version required you to insert the CD into the computer every time you used it, so I gave up a got the pirated version instead.
If you get the commercial version out of college it is thousands of dollars for base and thousands for each "toolbox". Want to have database functionality? Thousands of dollars, optimization functions? Thousands of dollars.
That might be worth it for national labs that like how the native IDE, plotting, GUI, widgets, ability to put into commercial projects (they've secured licensing for the math solvers for you)...etc. It is all better integrated than Python even with it's nice Spyder IDE.
The related product Simulink is not uncommon in larger engineering firms also.
Back in the day, the community around MatLab was quite large, but likely has declined in size in the last few years with the rise of Python in this area.