Matlab and PHP are very similar in their history. They weren't invented by programming language designers or compiler writers. The creators saw a problem and ca

Matlab and PHP are very similar in their history. They weren't invented by programming language designers or compiler writers. The creators saw a problem and came up with a makeshift quick solution. Which sucked but was good enough to solve the problem. Matlab was created to provide a simple way to make FORTRAN Libraries available to non-programmers. And it was quite successful at that. It was quickly picked up by engineers and all kinds of features were piled on top of it. And the worst thing is that Matlab is a de-facto standard in many areas now. As a webprogrammer you can probably easily avoid PHP by using Python, Ruby, JavaScript, Perl or whatever. But in engineering many people only know Matlab. They don't care about anything else.