Sounds like a niche to me, with lots of options (wrapping C numerical libraries in python) for people that don't want to be locked in.
When I was in school 15 years ago, matlab was pretty ubiquitous.
Maybe it was to strong to say it's irrelevant as opposed to niche, though it's definitely irrelevant in many fields where it used to be king. I do miss the figures though, I liked the combination of programmatic formatting + manual tweaks.
What exactly do you call a niche? Entire industries are being propped up using it. What happens is because the solvers are written in these things, engineers start building everything with matlab. I have personally made networking implementations, webservers, Apache Arrow clone etc. It's really not as niche as you think it is. For mostly worse, this language is everywhere.
When I was in school 15 years ago, matlab was pretty ubiquitous.
Maybe it was to strong to say it's irrelevant as opposed to niche, though it's definitely irrelevant in many fields where it used to be king. I do miss the figures though, I liked the combination of programmatic formatting + manual tweaks.