Matlab is great for a lot of things, though it's not really a great general purpose language. Its main problem is that it's not free (though octave exists, obviously), which limits interoperability. Octave can trivially be embedded in C++ and Python; if it was easier to do that with Matlab I wonder if numpy would have ever existed...(after all, numpy is essentially a port of Matlab semantics to Python... most Python numeric programmers are unwittingly basically writing Matlab already...).
This process of language love and hatred over a short period is what's called language fad. Ten years ago, people wrote articles praising MATLAB over established languages. I do not recall any of those writings ever mentioning Matlab's licensing as an issue. MATLAB is now >1000 fold better than ten years ago. Yet, the new generation throws it under the bus daily because it's not their favorite. Change is the only constant in the world of programing fashion and language fads.
