[devonkim]

After having worked with enough academicians, the code that I had to deal with was too agonizingly crufty for me to deal with that it made a huge influence over my decision to away from academia (and my subsequent drop in grades in school). I figured that if I had enough problems just dealing with the code, I couldn't imagine having to trudge through everything else that led up to that code. But it shattered my preconceived image of academicians being curious about everything and having a great deal of care and pride in the tooling they use - that I should look to them as reference rather than a bunch of people that dropped out of school for a quick buck, and that simply wasn't true whatsoever.

Matlab is going to be the COBOL of academia without some major groundbreaking research that invalidates or supersedes a great deal of research code, and given the community-consensus nature of so much research done I can't imagine quite something so disruptive happening.