I agree. If all they say is "end end end" you might as well use braces. I'm depressed to hear that Matlab is an inspiration to the language design at all; the Matlab language is by far the worst aspect of Matlab, and it has nothing to recommend it. Think of the damage that Sun did to Java to make it look familiar to C programmers; no need to repeat that mistake (though if you're cynical, you might think it was the smartest thing they ever did.)

Braces would be better than ending keywords, in my opinion, but I'm disappointed not to see whitespace-defined blocks of a la Python. Perhaps that doesn't work in a statically-typed, type-inferred language, but if it does, I think it would be much better. Scientists have no problem with it (certainly less of a problem than programmers do) and Python is pretty well accepted in the scientific computing community.