In my opinion Matlab the language sucks even for its intended use. What makes the complete package arely acceptable to work with is the environment, the documentation and the included libraries.
I did 5 years of image processing in Matlab but then switched to Python 4 years ago. One of the best choices I did in my programming career.
Interesting. I make a living developing backend systems in Python, but picked up Matlab (Octave) for machine learning, and really enjoyed doing linear algebra on it. For PoCs and general experimentation I find it more amenable than messing with Numpy. Of course it isn't great for building complete systems, but for self-contained programs - which I believe is the intended purpose - it works pretty well.
I did 5 years of image processing in Matlab but then switched to Python 4 years ago. One of the best choices I did in my programming career.