I don't use numerical processing, but my wife is a physicist and she uses Matlab and Maple a lot (on Vista and Ubuntu; the latter runs the same code 20 times faster :). I tried to teach her some Perl and PDL, but when she saw that it doesn't have Matlab-like IDE, she immediately gave up. Something like this should be in the options for the last question of the survey.

The installation from the CPAN shell and from the Ubuntu repository is very smooth to my taste, but i use CPAN every day and i am used to its quirks, so other people's mileage may vary.