Have to agree, working with fMRI and MRI data. Matlab is nearly impossible to debug or even find basic workarounds for problems in this domain, in comparison to Python, because of how closed and niche Matlab is, and the lack of community and trustworthy documentation, or ability to write sensible code with performant for loops.

In my experience, those arguing for the value of Matlab are mostly 50+ years old, or are in an extremely niche industry using something like e.g. Simulink or other highly-industry-specific tooling, in which case it seems the considerations are irrelevant to something like 99.5% of the modern population.

Matlab will clearly be dead and irrelevant otherwise, in a short amount of time and in almost all domains.

EDIT: And few things indicate an out-of-touch / cookie-cutter or almost-certainly p-hacked neuroscience paper like the use of MATLAB. It is a smell for incompetent legacy research in this domain.

> It is a smell for incompetent legacy research in this domain.

Wild to hear. At the time, almost everybody in the field used it. The then-dominant fMRI package (SPM) and EEG/MEG package (Fieldtrip) were both open-source Matlab. (I think I knew one prof who used BrainVoyager, and that's because he hired a former BV employee as an RA.)