C# and Visual Studio are pretty great now, and they don't lock you into Windows at all. Most of C# is open source.

For what it's worth, C# is a ECMA standardized language (https://www.ecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/standards/ecma-334/) and has a linux-based implementation (mono -- https://www.mono-project.com/docs/about-mono/).

Though it is hard to overcome the obvious Windows origins of the first implementation.

Preach it! One of my colleagues writes all his machine learning code in Matlab. Brilliant person, has done some incredible research, but can do anything with the code because no organization is going to bring Matlab into its clusters and pay for all the licenses needed to run it. So while plenty of presentations and papers have been written of this research, the actual process of letting people use it takes an additional army of Python developers to translate and test every new feature and enhancement.

This is what happens when you build your career around walled garden platforms. Inevitably, you'll reach a dead end. Focus on learning tools that enable you the most. Open source will always win in the end, because it will never come with this very heavy piece of baggage that proprietary tools have. This is why the internet is built on Linux and not Windows.

Unity is the same way. When you build your career on a technology that a single company can strip from you on a whim, that's a big risk. I really hope that Godot and other open source engines take off after this. It will be a painful transition for many developers, but hopefully it's a lesson very well learned.

When people at uni used Matlab, I learned R (before R-studio even existed) and python.

Good move. MATLAB is trash.

I never wanted to learn anything MS... ...or proprietary technologies such as... ...excel

Eh, depending on your career Excel is worth a tiny bit of time given its pervasiveness and how powerful it is. But like you say, learning open source will make Excel a piece of cake.

For me, it’s “learn everything”.

The best devs in XYZ language/framework aren’t the ones who are experts in XYZ, but the ones who are just good enough in XYZ and 15 other things that they see what XYZ excels at, and lacks, and how patterns from elsewhere could be adapted to supercharge XYZ’s strengths and mitigate its weaknesses.

That's a good rule. I only accidentally got into open-source, but now that I know what it is and what it's all about, I am totally sold on it and will almost always choose open-source over proprietary alternatives.

I agree for the most part, but Excel is just so good.

They say “Excel excels at excel”.

I'm curious why you chose R as an alternative to Matlab instead of Scilab. Scilab is specifically designed to be a free and open source alternative to Matlab.

For my thesis I was writing some test software and when deciding which language to use Matlab was immediately ruled out due to the cost (and also the extra cost for the toolkits I'd need). I instead went with Scilab which now means that anybody wanting to reproduce my results can do so freely.