Sure, if you work alone, don't collaborate, and don't require any extra toolboxes.
I've seen various communities move from Matlab to Python, Octave, R, and Julia notebooks (that now support several languages). Ease of collaboration (including git repos and notebook interfaces), transparency of the platform (to tell what it's really doing), and ability to use computational resources.
I had a request from a grad student to run a simulation on a 40 node cluster. Said cluster cost $110k, including 40 nodes costing a bit over $2k each and some networking/storage. This would have reduced their embarrassingly parallel projects for their phd from 6-12 months to 5 to 9 days. Sadly the required matlab licenses would have cost more than $110k (the cost of teh hardware) because of the licenses and extra toolboxes. They cried. They had to delay their graduation and either reduce it's scope or rewrite it.
I've seen various communities move from Matlab to Python, Octave, R, and Julia notebooks (that now support several languages). Ease of collaboration (including git repos and notebook interfaces), transparency of the platform (to tell what it's really doing), and ability to use computational resources.
I had a request from a grad student to run a simulation on a 40 node cluster. Said cluster cost $110k, including 40 nodes costing a bit over $2k each and some networking/storage. This would have reduced their embarrassingly parallel projects for their phd from 6-12 months to 5 to 9 days. Sadly the required matlab licenses would have cost more than $110k (the cost of teh hardware) because of the licenses and extra toolboxes. They cried. They had to delay their graduation and either reduce it's scope or rewrite it.