>And it's ridiculously easy for people to pick up matlab
Ah Matlab. Run a script for an hour only to get a "Inner matrix dimensions must agree." somewhere and you have no clue where it happened or why. That's when I decided to port all my stuff to a compiled language where it took 2 minutes to run.
That sort of sums up all my resentment of popular interpreted languages. Very few of those(Python especially) can do any kind of compile time checking.
I started with compiled languages, and stuck with them. I wouldn't recommend anything else to anyone