In my university, we were given a choice to use either Matlab or Python for exercises in many advanced courses. We even got Matlab licenses for our personal computers. But since the smallest Matlab installation still came in at several GB and my personal computer was always full with games, I chose the python stack which came in at maybe 100-200 MB for all relevant packages, while nearly everyone else chose Matlab. None of them have ever used Matlab again after University and I still use Python all the time.