So: "one kind of brace is overloaded to mean both, and the second kind is (seemingly randomly) assigned to work with just some datatypes."
Programming languages are not natural languages — this did not need to be so!
But Matlab has no BNF, burn it all!
Altho I'd no idea they were coding in Matlab until they claimed Matlab has no try. To which I replied with disbelief and then immediately looked it up. Anyway long story short it does, but it's NASTY. So this explains a little of why they were reluctant to use it, I guess. 
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Number 11: "Programmatic error handling is near impossible"


How will students, anybody, learn to code well if they cannot learn to catch errors?!
"programmatic handling errors in MATLAB in a reliable way is near impossible."


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OK, now we're done, if you want to read more — and I suggest you do! — check out the blog post I based this on: http://www.rath.org/matlab-is-a-terrible-programming-language.html … And mine too for a more pedagogical perspective:http://neuroplausible.com/matlab
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I do not want to shame anybody but please, think again before handing down any bad habits & please bear in mind Matlab is not
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To end, I just wanna say, one of the most heartening things is seeing people like
@inferencelab blog their journey into#opensource and just generally better coding: http://www.inferencelab.com/confessions-of-a-reforming-matlab-er/ … So yeah, mad props to all of you pushing yourselves and (y)our field(s) forwards!
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End of conversation
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