Matlab has its quirks, but I've never come across a better IDE for debugging 'scientific' code/scripts. Seeing current values by hovering over variables, the ability to pause and execute some 'testing' code, or overwrite things and carry on, being able to easily edit arrays/matrices in an excel-like table, having matrix arithmetic that doesn't look like shit when written as code... these are things that I find very useful. I use it in my field (structural engineering) for those reason alone, even if it might be slower, or more difficult to accomplish certain tasks.