[geek]Maple, Matlab, or Mathematica

[Maximus]

I haven't used any of them, but I am thinking it would be a good idea to get learn to use them so I'm looking at purchasing one. Not finding much in the way of objective comparison online, I am wondering what the languish geeks' experiences have been.

From what I can tell, Maple and Mathematica have similar function and similar price(for me at least.) Matlab seems a bit different and may be more appropriate for a CS environment, but I can only get a temporary license, although I can install and run for free if I connect to the university server.

What say you?

[The Brain]

Only used Maple and Matlab, and both 10+ years ago. Do you want to do symbolic calculations?

[Savonarola]

Matlab has some good toolboxes for engineering and is easy to write programs for.  It doesn't handle purely symbolic calculations well (at least in the versions I used) and when I had to do that I had to use Mathematica.  I didn't come across poblems like that very often so my preference would be Matlab.

[Vricklund]

I've used matlab extensively over the years. But I would never buy it. Nor would any of the companies I've worked with/for. Try out the open source Scilab, it's pretty similar.

[Barrister]

I used Mathematica in 1996...

[Gbeagle]

I've used both maple and mathematica. I prefer mathematica personally over maple. Never really used Matlab, but then its not really geared towards physics.

[DGuller]

It's been 6 years since I've dealt with that.  Matlab is the program to use if you want to do engineering stuff, Mathematica is if you want to do some very cool symbolic manipulation, Maple is for when you can't get your hands on Mathematica.