Scilab – Open source software for numerical computation (opens in new tab)

Scilab development started from the same Fortran code Matlab did, around the same time; also it rarely attempts to copy Matlab syntax or behaviour. (I'm just saying it should be seen more as an alternative to Matlab, not a copy.)

I personally would tend to agree that developing in a general purpose language is better for most problems but an imperative math-oriented language that's simple to apprehend remains a large use-case for scholars and engineers. For that I feel that the rewrite of most of the code in the past few years has been a worthwhile endeavour.

As for the alternative I'd say, Julia is (will be) a good choice also. Long in the making with a beautiful syntax which somewhat resembles Matlab. Sound "inner" foundation. And speed. Speed like no other dynamic language (important with increasing data abundance). Friendly and helpful community.

Matlab is a tremendously poor ecosystem. Not flexible at all in terms of libraries, slow, closed source and poorly designed as a language.

You could just see what Python has achieved in the last years as a scientifical tool: awesome libraries, interfaces with web/mobile applications, tons of rich courses/tutorials.

I hope it teaches other fields that open source can really be key in making tremendous progress.

Scilab is one of the two major open-source alternatives to MATLAB, the other one being GNU Octave.[1][2][3][4] Scilab is similar enough to MATLAB that some book authors (who use it) argue that it is easy to transfer skills between the two systems.[5] Scilab however puts less emphasis on (bidirectional) syntactic compatibility with MATLAB than Octave does.[1][6][7]

I'm a control engineer by training, and to be honest there's really no equivalent to Matlab/Simulink right now for control system design. Fortunately I'm currently working on statistics/sensor-fusion related stuff, and Python works just fine for that.

(DISCLAIMER: I’m the guy that started SageMath.)

MathWorks provides a way to call Python from MATLAB with the same simplicity as it can call Java. I don't think anyone declared MATLAB dead but it's a clear indication that they're losing ground.

Scilab doesn't try that exactly. They have their own syntax and some compatibility converter from Matlab code to Scilab code, but I don't thik it's as complete as Octave's.

As a sibling comment mentions, Scilab has Xcos which tries to be a modelling helper like Simulink and Octave has nothing comparable.

This is a really strange statement to me. Python has much better syntax for vectorised operations than Matlab. I have written a great deal of both (Python by choice, Matlab when required to), and in my experience almost everything numerical is easier to express in Python.

Numpy is in large part a thin wrapper over fast low-level libraries, but with an excellent well-designed interface, unlike the undesigned growth-by-accretion of Matlab.