[ubj]

MATLAB is very much still in use by large corporations and national laboratories. I'm currently a full time researcher at MIT Lincoln Laboratory and did a summer internship at MITRE a couple years ago, and MATLAB is/was the de facto standard language for the majority of staff.

If your company can afford it, and if it has good toolboxes for your field, MATLAB is a solid tool. Its plotting capabilities are the gold standard for a large portion of science--python's matplotlib and similar plotting libraries in other languages are in large part based on MATLAB's plotting experience. Others in this thread have mentioned Simulink, which is also top of the line for control theory analysis.

I think an underappreciated capability of MATLAB is its C/C++ code generation, which is quite good. It'll transpile MATLAB source code (with some minimal type annotations) into C/C++ source code that you can take wherever you want.

Having said all that, it still has plenty of flaws including its price tag. One field where I get the sense that it lags is AI/ML--I have never seen a paper introducing a groundbreaking result that uses MATLAB's ML toolboxes.

I prefer Julia / Python / C++ for my own work, but will still reach for MATLAB every once in a while.