I'm going to echo Dijkstra here: It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to MATLAB: as potential progr

I'm going to echo Dijkstra here: It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to MATLAB: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration. Matlab is a very poor language in and of itself, but it doesn't help that the culture in Matlab (at least whhen I was last exposed to it) doesn't use revision control or write tests. And if you want to productionize a service you have to screw around with licenses on deployment machines, use the painful Matlab compiler, or just reimplement the relevant work. It's just a dead end technical credit card -which may be good for some! Don't get me wrong. But for many many people it just makes a mess.