- julia is an emerging language for fast computation, machine learning etc.,
- R is a language of choice for statistical analysis and data sciences
- scilab is a fully loaded language by itself.
- perl is good at string processing and lots of modules to use.
As you learn, you will see that there are a lot of alternative languages, packages and tools that can help you get your work done before going to commercial packages such as Matlab, Mathematica, Maple etc.,