If your college/university teaches you anything on Matlab then most likely they have Campus Wide Access license.
Which means you can use your student university email to register an account with Matlab and gain free access to use Matlab and Simulink software on your own PC/Mac computer.
After downloading the software and installing it, make sure you select all the libraries you need during the installation process.
Also make sure you are signed-in, in the software itself using your Matlab account, for the license to activate.
I agree with most of what you said, specially for those doing CS, maths and statistics, data science. It’s cheaper, easier and wiser to just learn python. Specially that you’ll learn more programming doing python than Matlab.
However for engineering projects/work related to electrical, mechanical and such, the alternatives are not as good. Python BMS is improving but still not as good as Simulink.
Plus as a student usually you don’t have the freedom of choice, if the course requires Matlab (and most engineering degrees do) then you must learn it, at least to the level that you can finish the required tasks/assignments.
Personally I’m not a huge fan of Matlab, it’s just a tool in my arsenal for specific tasks. Anything else I would prefer any other general-purpose programming language such as cpp, python…etc.
It is not true that Matlab is without alternative in engineering. Peter Corke migrated his famous robotics toolbox from Matlab to Python.
petercorke/robotics-toolbox-python
And for robotics there is actually ROS 2. Matlab is still there, but i think its dying.
I didn’t say there are no alternatives, i said they are still not as good. Some libraries/toolset are still buggy, others lacking features, some are developing but really slow and lacking resources…etc.
For the time being, some users just want a tool that works, and if they have the license for it then why not? Plus no engineer will stick to one tool for the rest of their career anyway.
The problem is that Matlab isn’t free nor gratis. It is closed source commercial dev environment for a high price. It might be of no cost for students, but after being a student it costs a lot. Also, there are really better ways to learn programming than Matlab. It doesn’t even support OOP.
As such, i would really recommend to any student to avoid Matlab if possible. Learn real languages such as Python, C++ etc.
I started my MSc and part of it involved building a ray-tracing simulation. I built it in MATLAB, but the technical debt quickly became so high that I had to rebuild it all in Python.
MATLAB does have classes, but it is hot garbage. Distributed computing is also awful (I moved to Python and Pyspark in quick succession and life got a lot better).
The only industry job I have seen request MATLAB was for legacy companies like Telesat and I wouldn’t be surprised if they were moving towards Python since the license fees are insane.