[ohsonice]

My (math graduate school) perspective:

MATLAB is adored in academia for a number of reasons. It is easy to make readable small scripts for in-class examples. The debugging feature/IDE is easy to navigate. The school pays for the licenses; there is no overhead work to compile or download packages (unless you want to do something 'fancy').

I took a ML course that was taught in Python. All my Numerical Analysis and Modeling courses relied on MATLAB for examples and homework. I (as a programmer outside of just the math world) picked Julia for research. Now I do much more theoretical research, as I did not enjoy mixing coding and mathematics.

A fellow student, developing PDE solvers in FORTRAN was told by a mentor to get it to work in MATLAB first and then move on to faster languages.

Happy to answer any questions :)