Last time I dealt with Matlab much was like fifteen years ago when I was helping some people using it for quick interpretation of data. We just kept finding bugs that caused calculation errors (which they fixed pretty quickly TBF) and it was so much slower than any other general programming language we tried. It could be way better now, I wouldn't know, I haven't had call to use it since... A circuit simulation class?
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.