Have to learn the Matlab language for school. It's proprietary, you have to pay for it, and arrays are not even 0 indexed!

octave?

I wish that was an option

on my high-school days (3 years ago) students were eligible for free license for educational purposes if I remember correctly. Had a lot of fun prototyping with matlab, although its OOP syntax sucks.
Once PoC was done we converted our project (remote controlled robot which plays billiard) to OpenCV on C++.