1) JavaScript is obviously fine for an introduction and pedagogical benefits trump all other concerns so the author of the post picked a very good tool for the

1) JavaScript is obviously fine for an introduction and pedagogical benefits trump all other concerns so the author of the post picked a very good tool for the job at hand. 2) If you want to be grumpy and complain about "what has the world come to". I'd rather use Fortran than C for this specific domain. I'd also rather use Fortran than Matlab. If it's a bigger project and not the typical "academic toy example" I'd very much prefer Python+NumPy over Matlab (if I was a better Fortran programmer I'd use that but I lack software engineering expertise with Fortran). I can very much live with the performance loss (which isn't even major) if I gain engineering benefits. You can always measure + optimize later if need be. +I'd rather not waste time thinking about licensing