Funny, I agree with the structure of what his argument and the limitations of Matlab but disagree with the pedagogical conclusions. I learned to drive on automatic transmission cars, and found it a good stepping-stone to learning how to use a manual transmission. I just had to buy a cheap used car to make it happen. Likewise, I started coding seriously using Matlab (well, IDL even before that.) I'm slowly transitioning to Python and (command line) Julia, I think this would be much more frustrating if it weren't for the experience with Matlab. Even reading the occasional block of C code is easier after the Matlab experience.