R above JavaScript? Matlab above Go? Something tells me that the ranking algorithm is broken.
This has been a big problem for me in Dercuano; the notes in it about signal processing and circuits vary between impenetrable and handwavy (and, in the worst cases, both) in large part because I'm doing my prototypes in IPython with Numpy or in Falstad's circuit.js, and there's just no reasonable way to include that in Dercuano itself. So I'm trying to figure out how to make prototyping signal processing algorithms in JS a reasonable thing to do. I don't expect to have feature parity with Octave, but I feel like it should be possible to improve on the VT100-based user interface featured even by Octave and Rstudio, and offer equal or better performance and enough conveniently accessible features that it's practical for at least what I'm doing.
Virtuall all industrial control and systems engineering is written in matlab.
A big chunk of scientific and engineering code is written in matlab.
I do agree that people frequently overestimate the homogeneity of programming, and that this homogeneity makes such lists less useful. Still, I think it's a useful observation that in 1985 Paul Lansky was writing music in FORTRAN and electrical engineers were writing circuit simulators in FORTRAN, while today musicians tend to do their software development in PureData or something similar, while electrical engineers tend to use MATLAB, Octave, C++, or Python. And I think part of the nature of software development is that it's typically a highly collaborative activity --- a library written by an electrical engineer can be used by a musician, but usually only if they're using the same programming language.
Most engineering students use it, as well as some in math and physics. It is also popular in various aspects of industry (Ex: automotive and aerospace) for prototyping and simulations.