My wife recently went back to school for civil engineering. They must take one programming course, in matlab. So we have this community of academic go-getter students who've never programmed before, suddenly working hard to learn about for-loops and structs and functions in Matlab. As a computer scientist it has been fun teaching them a bit. The assignments are easy enough that I can help a ton without knowing any syntax and just learn language features on the fly.
Matlab is awesome. I had to learn it for a class in Computational Photography back in school. The matrix-centric language design is an interesting change from traditional languages and the amazing linear solvers available give you a shocking amount of power sometimes. For example, the language has really good SIMD/parallelism support out of the box, because you are steered towards making all of your variables into vectors and performing batch processing. Backslash is also an incredibly powerful tool in the right hands, and lends itself to some beautiful oneliners (it’s sort of like a shell language in that way).
What a coincidence! I'm in my first year of civil engineering taking a MATLAB course right now. I do have some previous coding experience, though. For me, it's all the math stuff that drives me insane.
