I don't know how honest this student is being, but I do know Matlab has a place in the classroom and that it has some qualities that a lot of people here surely admire.

Matlab started life as an interface to preexisting Fortran routines. The point was to avoid reinventing the wheel and to keep easy things easy. Later, I think, Matlab came with a simple shell-like interface, one I'm sure the PDL developers owe something to, and a scripting language. This was nice because the scripts ran like native Matlab functions. Suddenly everybody was sharing scripts--like Perl's modules today.

There were other nice things that Matlab introduced but you get my point: if you can reach higher with Perl, you are standing on someone's shoulders.

(Apologies to Newton and to everyone who knows this story better than I do.)