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“Engineers love it for prototyping, though”

Makes perfect sense. Matlab is for engineers, not for mathematicians. They use computer algebra systems, proof assistants, etc. Difference is that engineers (and physicists) want answers and don’t care about how they are obtained, while its the reverse for mathematicians.

I think APL, although it, too, is a language for computing numbers, spiritually is a bit closer to mathematics than Matlab.

>>Someon+(OP)
I'm a bit of both, so I guess I take the radical approach--straight from mathematics to C++/ASM/FPGA/ASIC. Ultimately programming languages are just an alternate notative system for mathematics--formal language theory actually formalizes and generalizes this, it's what us Computer Scientist's specialize in generally.

Since the computer is just a glorified calculator with memory (sorry Apple), we can fit the whole thing into a formal mathematical framework.