Matlab stands for matrix laboratory, the kind of lab you feel you belong to.
It is quite popular and even has a free-software clone, Octave (name is not as great). The "cloning" is supposed to be taken seriously since matlab syntax not processing by octave is regarded as a bug! This is the language I used to teach the course Computación I at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.
We personally prefer Mathematica & for open-source software, Julia.