For someone who has never programmed before, Matlab may be more
intuitive.
Yes, this is Matlab's target audience: programmers who will not call themselves "programmers". In recent versions, they have tried even harder to hide the code away from the user, by trying to make everything work by clicking on buttons. I have heard from many Matlab users call themselves "not a programmer". They don't feel like writing software is what they're doing when they're using Matlab.
On balance, I've met people who claim they are intermediate programmers and use matlab only, and are freaked to shit when they see higher order functions in other languages, or even the idea of passing a "function", like, say, a pointer to a function, into another function, even though function pointers have existed since C.
They exist in Matlab too. They're called function handles. Matlab has functionalish functions like `arrayfun`, `cellfun` (akin to `map`) or `accumarray` (akin to `fold`), but the Matlab documentation prefers to teach loops, presumably because they're easier to understand, and usually faster in Matlab thanks to their JIT compiler.
I'm surprised that people are so surprised that you can pass function handles around, since there are some Matlab functions for solving ODEs or root-finding that are very commonly taught in intro courses that require function handles. I guess not everyone's first exposure to Matlab involves solving ODEs or root-finding.
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On balance, I've met people who claim they are intermediate programmers and use matlab only, and are freaked to shit when they see higher order functions in other languages, or even the idea of passing a "function", like, say, a pointer to a function, into another function, even though function pointers have existed since C.
They exist in Matlab too. They're called function handles. Matlab has functionalish functions like `arrayfun`, `cellfun` (akin to `map`) or `accumarray` (akin to `fold`), but the Matlab documentation prefers to teach loops, presumably because they're easier to understand, and usually faster in Matlab thanks to their JIT compiler.
I'm surprised that people are so surprised that you can pass function handles around, since there are some Matlab functions for solving ODEs or root-finding that are very commonly taught in intro courses that require function handles. I guess not everyone's first exposure to Matlab involves solving ODEs or root-finding.
Also at least in ALGOL 68, COBOL, and FORTRAN 77. Maybe earlier, too.