In all reality it's fine for what it does, just like every other language. It's another tool in the box that's most useful for a certain set of problems.

Matlab shouldn't, in my opinion, be used to construct a GUI, or generally be used for any sort of production code. Perfectly fine as a research tool though.

But I digress, my overall point is a meaningless semantic joke. The only people who will get bent out of shape about splitting hairs between "scripting" and "programming" are all people who belong in this community.