It's also difficult to learn the new paradigm of a language, especially since MATLAB is so tightly coupled with the IDE and every other programming languages is

It's also difficult to learn the new paradigm of a language, especially since MATLAB is so tightly coupled with the IDE and every other programming languages is usually run on the command line. You can use an IDE for those languages, but it usually requires some setup and sometimes that breaks. I recently found Spyder IDE for Python which feels a lot like MATLAB. Despite my hate for MATLAB, I did at times appreciate the layout of the IDE and the way variables are still available after running a script. Spyder fortunately has a similar interface, except even better since you can restart the interpreter without restarting the IDE. I highly recommend it as a MATLAB replacement!