"I have direct experience of universities doing horrifyingly wasteful computations" is not the ringing endorsement for Matlab you might think it to be...
Granted, I've seen Python horrors on university HPC clusters too, but at least there are libraries and clear documentation (e.g. Lightning, Ray, etc) for how to properly manage these things. Good luck finding that with Matlab.
Universities are not wasteful. University graduates earn more and face fewer unemployment than high school graduates. More universities correlates with higher GDP per capita.
Sorry if I was unclear, but GP is correct, you are misreading quite deeply.
I am saying that because it is much harder to find good documentation on using MATLAB on HPCs, a lot of computations on HPCs that use MATLAB are highly wasteful compared to if they had been written using a language and/or tools that make it much easier to use HPC resources more efficiently. I was NOT in any way saying that "universities are wasteful".
Fair. My point though is that in scientific research, accuracy of the results come first. It does not mean anything that research was performed efficiently if the results are incorrect.
Granted, I've seen Python horrors on university HPC clusters too, but at least there are libraries and clear documentation (e.g. Lightning, Ray, etc) for how to properly manage these things. Good luck finding that with Matlab.