I literally mentioned Python in one of my above comments lol and it is my daily driver. Still, as an undergrad with zero programming experience, Matlab was very easy to use for the kind of things that undergrads do in engineering and physics (play with matrices, differential equations, make charts...etc). I would agree that machine learning is likely to be easier in Python, but then again, ML students already know how to code, understand OO, and other concepts. Matlab is popular where people are good at math, but have no clue what objects are.