r2008a won't allow you to put a matlab icon on the Dock (not even StartMatlab) -- it seems that Mac support is slipping backwards from an already pretty basic level. I sometimes wonder if the 'a' and 'b' in the version numbers are for 'alpha' and 'beta'.

Initially steep learning curve, and you have to do everything from scratch. For instance, to have a function of x you first have to define an x vector. It's a pretty low-level programming environment in this sense. But once you've built up a personal library of basic routines, Matlab is fast and easy to use, and much less frustrating in many ways than Mathematica. Plus its 3D plots look very good.

I use this in school a lot for Diff Eqns, optimization, and simulations. But, the school has it on Linux machines only... so I have to ssh in X11 on my mac.

platform tool used in most tech/research institutes. However, support for mac is pretty lousy. There is no Intel support in the forseable future. So i have to run it with Parallels, which turned out to be suprisingly fast.

This is the most amazing programming environment for sample-level audio processing (with the dsp toolbox, obviously). Highly recommended for super-geeks.