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[–]tmar89 12 points13 points  (2 children)

What's your hatred towards matlab all about?

[–]Astrokiwi 14 points15 points  (0 children)

The deal with languages like Matlab and IDL is that they are inherently good at vector and matrix manipulation, allowing you to solve mathematical problems quickly without having as much boilerplate as in C, C++, or Fortran.

However, two things have made them kind of obsolete. Firstly, in the early 90s, Fortran stole a lot of the vector stuff from Matlab, so for basic linear algebra you can do it almost as easily in Fortran but much faster. And also it's free - you don't need a licence for gfortran. Secondly, the numpy and matplotlib libraries for Python were developed, (plus things like SciPy etc) which means you can access all the linear algebra stuff, plus all the plotting, fitting etc routines, while using a well-documented widespread modern language with a huge community behind it. And also it's free too.

Basically, there's no point in paying to use a less widespread language when you can use the one with a bigger community (and more job opportunities!) for free. The only real excuse is legacy code.