If signal processing and matrix algoritms are your thing, you should (and probably would) be using Matlab. Most statisticians don't really do much of that, what they mostly do is data management and try to mold their tables in some form accepted by an existing R package (or even Stata). As far as I remember, Matlab was pretty horrible for data munging, even worse than R for anything non-numerical. But my Matlab experience is also almost 2 decades old, so I don't know if it's any better today.