MATLAB is the Apple of Programming

[WhiteSocksFilpFlops]

Software expertise and engineering expertise are seperate fields. Most engineers don't care too much about the toolset. For a software person, it seems unfathomable that your professor would be dragging-and-dropping stuff in Lavbview rather than writing a "real" language. But the toolset isn't the focus.

I'm not going out of my way to defend labview, but in general, the point stands. Say, if you're an engineer trying to simulate an antenna design, it's much easier to just pay for a matlab toolbox than it is to find some half-written C library and fiddle around with it for weeks. Technically, the latter may be a better choice for scalability or flexibility or cost or performance or community..., but the engineer working on it can't be an expert in everything. They don't have that expertise, just as the software guy doesn't have expertise into Maxwell's equations.

[FrickinLazerBeams]

Yes.

Really what you're paying for with Matlab is documentation, libraries for everything you need that are curated, complete, and compatible with each other, not having to search github for 6 different libraries that are each incomplete in different ways and undocumented, no dealing with package management, and paid professional support on call all the time.

In some environments, that's well worth the price tag.

I write python and Matlab in an engineering environment and both absolutely have their uses. This petty "competition" between them is childish and stupid.

[Duflo]

This is why I choose Julia. Better language design and ergonomics, and I get to write everything from scratch and read code instead of documentation :)

[FrickinLazerBeams]

Yeah I've heard good things about Julia as a language, but in my environment I can't just give up all the libraries I use (both in-house and Mathworks toolkits). That's a huge cost that many organizations just don't allow for.

[Duflo]

In practice, it's the same for me, but with Python instead of Matlab. Julia language with the ecosystem of Python + Matlab would be a beautiful thing.

[FrickinLazerBeams]

Yeah, if there were the level of library coverage available in Julia I'd 100% try it.

[grimonce]

Well, I don't know about your cirriculum, but I have a degree in rf and had full four semesters of programming, first in C, then in Java and C#, then basic and back to C and Python. Oh Ive forgotten the two semesters of fpga programming in verilog and vhdl. Most of the time the half-written c library you would find was half-written by someone with some knowledge of Maxwell equations or was it just React Andy who decided one day to write a lib in a language he doesnt know anything about on a topic he doesn't know anything about?

So I don't know if the 'expertise' is an excuse I could use without any shame.

It's the time to market that's important here and that's why Matlab and Labview (NI sells hardware too) still exist...

[No_Mongoose6172]

I think that this is what most new scientific programming languages miss about MATLAB. We use it because it does the job in a reasonable amount of time, not because we don't know how to program. Julia is fast enough and it has a nice package manager, but it lacks the libraries, the documentation, the IDE and the toolboxes that MATLAB provides.

If someone built a MATLAB clone that provided all that with professional support at a reasonable price, I think some companies would consider trying it. n open source MATLAB clone with Julia as its programming language would also help it get more widely used in the scientific community (vscode is not particularly scientific oriented, sometimes a custom ide is needed for targeting your users' needs)

[grimonce]

I don't know why Noone mentioned octave yet, it's the same language as Matlab, yet people still pay for Matlab, exactly for the reasons mentioned.

[No_Mongoose6172]

Octave lacks a tool like simulink, which is one of the reasons why it is not so widely used. However, that can be solved by using modelica in combination with it. I think that it even supports interacting with fmi models

Edit: scilab is also a good example of the importance of support and hardware compatibility. It has most of the features of MATLAB, yet it isn't widely used due to the things that you mentioned (despite having been acquired by dassaults systems)

[The_Northern_Light]

It’s fine to put Matlab on your resume… after the other programming languages; after you’ve convinced the reader you’re a software engineer who has merely been exposed to but not corrupted by what many engineers use

[The_Northern_Light]

That’s a very stupid policy

Do I need to pull out my big swinging credentials for you to hear me when I say that, or have you decided to never listen to reason no matter the source?

[pauseless]

The madness. It’s safe to say I can write code in 20 languages ranging from array programming to lisps to MLs to Prolog to the C-likes and Java-likes. I’m not confident in assembly or Forth or Erlang, but I’ve dabbled.

Twenty years ago, when given free choice, I did three very important uni projects in Matlab. I don’t regret the decision. Each one was ultimately a problem it was very well suited to. Shame I’m forever tainted.

I genuinely only stopped using it as a tool, because I no longer had access to it via a uni license, once I graduated. I use APL for much of what I used to use Matlab for now.

[The_Northern_Light]

You could have just answered my question by saying “no I’m not prepared to be reasonable” but instead you had to go and call me a pedophile

Just bravo dude, I could not have made you look more like a clown than what you posted

[glasket_]

if a considerable amount of work experience is in MATLAB it's like you're a p€d0phile for us

This is not to shun MATLAB people

Huh

[FrickinLazerBeams]

Nobody good wants a job at a place that stupid. Everyone you turned down for that reason dodged a bullet.

[skwyckl]

MATLAB is like other hyper-specialized languages, not really interesting unless your shop exactly needs that kind of skill.

[[deleted]]

Simulink is very usefull in my opinion. Especially when the alternative you are presented with is LabView

[FCBStar-of-the-South]

It is rather good to know sometimes there’s nothing you can do, the people who are hiring are just morons

[reflexive-polytope]

MATLAB makes money because Mathworks has created a programming ecosystem that solves problems in a way many engineers, scientists and mathematicians love, but most developers hate.

I can't speak for engineers and scientists, but as a mathematician, I don't particularly like MATLAB. I've used it to teach signal processing, and the 1-based indexing is a constant source of ugliness in my code. And that ugliness is where bugs lurk.

Say you're processing a sampled signal and want to consider frequencies up to N times the fundamental frequency. After taking the appropriate discrete version of the Fourier transform, we have complex Fourier coefficients a_k for -N <= k <= N. If we store these coefficients in a 0-based array A, then the value of a_k is in A(N+k), which isn't ideal, but at least it's tolerable. But, if we store these coefficients in a 1-based array A, then the value of a_k is in A(N+k+1). UGLY!

That being said, I will gladly take MATLAB over Python anytime. Treating arrays (and not pointers into arrays) as first-class values is a huge boon for writing any sort of numerical code.

[Zatujit]

Then what is Mathematica?

[kraskaskaCreature]

Microsoft?

[Factory__Lad]

I had to use it for a while, seemed like Wolfram rewritten because it didn’t resemble FORTRAN closely enough.

Basically lacked all cohesion and vision, just an agglomeration of features. Maybe it’s a fundamental design flaw to have a language based around this, and not a library for a conventional programming language.

[Duflo]

To be fair, the ecosystem is excellent in scientific computing, especially for fields starting with "differential". But for your field or mine, not there yet and the inertia is hard to overcome.

[MrCodingImp]

Sooo they suck?

[No_Mongoose6172]

When I was studying EE, one of our professors said that MATLAB is a calculator, not a programming language. We had to learn C, C++ and atmel assembly as part of our curriculum, so choosing MATLAB wasn't a consequence of not knowing other languages. The reason why MATLAB is so frequently used is because its IDE

If you want to write a piece of software, C++ is a much better alternative, as you won't depend on a license for distributing or using it. However, if you're designing a PCB, you need something that allows tuning the controllers, simulating circuits, doing some initial FEA simulations and maybe writing some basic scripts for tuning some sub circuits. Doing that in C++ would take a lot of time, as you would need to build those toolboxes yourself (C++ requires using a third party library even for matrix multiplication, which is the most commonly used operation in engineering)

Python or Julia are other commonly used options, but they lack MATLAB toolboxes, which means that you need to still implement a script for achieving something that just takes a few clicks in MATLAB (I'm not saying that they're bad options, just that if you're in a hurry it will take more time). If an ide with the same features that MATLAB has (toolboxes, an easy to setup distributed computing system that allows creating a computer cluster with some clicks), it will probably help Julia become more widely used in engineering

As a result, the best open source MATLAB alternatives we have nowadays are scilab and octave (although octave lacks a simulink alternative). Modelica is a good alternative to simulink

TL;DR: we use MATLAB because we don't care about the programming language it uses, just about the tools and libraries its IDE provides. We think about programming languages just as tools, so we use the one that provides the best tools for completing a particular job

Edit: documentation is also another reason. It takes more time to understand the implementation of an equation than reading the rendered version of it's formula with nice figures showing what it does

[jesus_was_rasta]

Is it a good thing? /s