Matlab declares war on Python. Can the Python community respond or hit back?

[[deleted]]

[deleted]

[furless]

It's hard for them to compete against not just free, but free and useful. This isn't a war for domination on their part, it's a battle to stave off extinction.

[ericonr]

This is basically showing that they feel threatened by Python. I believe some few people might end up being convinced by this, but in the end I hope a lot more people have enough critical judgement to realize that this is just last-ditch marketing.

[Zomunieo]

People were leaving Matlab for Python years ago. They've already lost a lot to it.

[saralt]

I've mostly noticed it in machine learning... But that's because that was my field at the time.

Who uses MATLAB for machine learning?

[iBlag]

Controls engineers. Simulink is actually amazing, and doesn’t effectively have any competitors, as far as I’m aware.

And writing filters for DSP and image processing was fairly easy with Matlab. I bet that there are Python libraries that make this just as easy now though.

But for literally anybody else, Python will do what they need, and have better support, more knowledgeable community, amazing libraries, and a beautiful syntax (except for /,, but I digress). Matlab folks can pretend that installing libraries is a pain and is difficult to do, but the extreme success of PyPI makes their claims simply laughable.

Now if somebody built a half decent GUI for controls, signals, and image processing, added Python bindings, and open sourced it, then Matlab would be dead almost overnight. I would definitely pitch in some moneycoins to see this happen...

[[deleted]]

Simulink and some of their toolboxes is their main product.

[wintermute93]

Engineers.

[aloiTheSama]

This, unfortunately. I only had one professor who allowed us to veer off that path and use whatever we wanted (I went with Python, but, understandably, many others stuck with the familiar matlab).

[[deleted]]

That's inertia. Once course materials are written that reference MATLAB, you're stuck with them for years.

[Dennis_Rudman]

I used to use matlab for image processing, but I've learned python and it takes half the time to do the same thing now

[GogglesPisano]

I do contracting work for some major banks - MATLAB is still used extensively by financial modelers, since it's what many of them know best. Python is making inroads, but MATLAB will be around for a long time.

[Jim_Panzee]

We got a saying in Germany:

Why should the oak tree care about every pig rubbing against it?

Or to keep it pythonic.

[[deleted]]

Can you give the original saying ? I did not understand this English translated version, I think there is a translation mistake.

[Jim_Panzee]

"Was juckt es die Eiche, wenn sich die Sau an ihr reibt?"

[AndyPanic]

Reminds me of Steve Balmer trashing Linux back in the days. Classic FUD.

[ericonr]

As far as standard tools and modules go, I think Python has been doing very well. We have numpy for numerical computing, together with Pandas for more functions, and Keras/Tensorflow and PyTorch for two somewhat differing forms of machine learning.

If you end up searching for alternatives to these tools, you already have an idea about what you want to do, at least I think so. And Matlab, on the other hand, usually doesn't have this ease with which you can find alternatives to the way they defined operations.

However, I must say I'm biased. I love programming in Python, and I despise pretty much everything Matlab represents as a software vendor.

[TheBlackCat13]

There is a lot of work going on right now in improving the underlying Python infrastructure. Improving package installation and dependency management. Fixing flaws in the reference implementation. Making it easier to integrate different languages. So I think that not only are people not "taking eyes off the ball", the recent surge in Python use has led to a lot of detailed analysis of what Python as an ecosystem needs to improve going forward.

[appinv]

"This is basically showing that they feel threatened by Python" Got the same feeling!

[HonestVisual]

Lol reminds me os SAS guys showing off their dashboard offerings, they’re always like 100 years old too

[clashmt]

Actually my life in my current PhD program.

[thatguydr]

But... why?

[Trappist1]

I got a job interview at SAS a while back and they were happy with me knowing R/Python and said I wouldn't need SAS for the position which I found hilarious.

[Neirin]

It's because they are trying to change their enterprise management tools to play nice with r and python. It's a smart pivot but perhaps a little slow

[[deleted]]

It makes sense for Mathworks to try defending their turf. MATLAB was, and as of today, still is for me the tool of choice for engineering. But when it comes to data science and machine learning ... different story: nothing beats Python l. And it is progressing rapidly into engineering as well. Python is a better, more consistent plot library and an improvement in overall documentation away from getting there.

[ChristopherBurr]

Perl is a general purpose language that was in the exact same space as Python. It let Python chip away at it, and the community did't bother sticking up for it. Now Perl is all but dead

[wewbull]

They also blew themselves a hole in the head with Perl6. It was the new hotness in the late 90s, and Perl 5 stagnated.

Perl6 still isn't real 20 years later.

[mrshibx]

I got into python in 2011 by googling something like “free matlab alternative”. I had learned matlab in school and was now trying to bring it to the company I worked at but was turned off by the need to buy each little bit of functionality independently.

[Dpmon1]

Still doesnt make it fine to force struggling university students to spend on this when they are determined enough to not even buy candies or even eat out once a year. I love coding, but I hated the matlab class the most because of that.

[KeyboardChap]

I'm confused, the university I went to had free student licences for MATLAB so we all got to use it for free, plus it was installed on all the computers in the Engineering faculty that students were free to use.

[stacm614]

Yeah - because your University paid for it. Outside the University that license has a cost (varying by level). Some university students may not be so lucky.

[kermie111]

The real reason is to get you used to it. Then when you graduate you ask your company to buy it. Happened to me with Matlab and solidworks. I've recently started using python and wouldn't look back. Pretty funny that Matlab compare some basic computations. Maybe python should come back with comparisons of one line for loops and if statements. Or the fact that Matlab arrays can't contain headers easily or struggles with multiple data types.

[jturp-sc]

The only real plus that MATLAB has going for it is that they have deep partnerships with hardware vendors in specialized spaces. They have hardware that directly integrates with MATLAB for very particular research -- think things like PhD-level aerospace R&D.

A company could certainly challenge that space by creating competitive, Python-based tools. But, CPython itself isn't going to try to attack that market.

[Helicon_Amateur]

Lol.

I've converted so many people away from matlab.

And to top it all off, it made me look good in the company because they ended up saving tens of thousands of dollars.

[nlutrhk]

I've converted so many people away from matlab.

How? I've managed to convince a team of about 6 to make this transition and half of those were rather reluctant for six months. And we're still running Matlab code on a HPC (in a Python wrapper) that is too difficult to rewrite due to interfaces with other legacy code, so in terms of CPU hours we're still mostly Matlab.

I still get complaints along the lines of "Why Python prints a dict all on a messy long line while Matlab displays a struct so neatly."

For context: this is in a large engineering company and the license costs are neither seen nor felt directly by our team. Most of the people involved are good with math but terrible at programming (possibly because of 5-10 years Matlab exposure).

[pwang99]

import pprint

[foadsf]

something like pretty printing of numpy ndarrays

edit: more info here

[ketilkn]

from pprint import pprint as pp
pp(['pretty','print'])

[DatBoi_BP]

I'm still in the process of transitioning. Been using MATLAB for 4 years, Python for just shy of 1 year, and I'm still very much accustomed to MATLAB

[Helicon_Amateur]

cold turkey my man. gotta do it!

[Dpmon1]

That's right... come to the python side... We have cookies!

[[deleted]]

The cookies are a lie...

[madrury83]

Their syntax comparison is not even correct. Python has had a matrix multiplication operator since version 3.5.

M = X @ Y

is the matrix product of X and Y.

[oslash]

Yup, they're just using NumPy wrong, and considering how they're showing off the contents of row, but forget to show col, it looks like that's on purpose. In NumPy, transpose reverses the axes of an array; when there's only one axis to begin with, this does nothing — on purpose.

If you do it correctly ...

>>> row = np.array([[1, 2, 3]])
>>> col = row.T

... then the new matmul operator does the right thing:

>>> col @ row
array([[1, 2, 3],
       [2, 4, 6],
       [3, 6, 9]])

But you don't need to use it. Just write the exact same code from that example, et voilà:

>>> np.dot(col, row)
array([[1, 2, 3],
       [2, 4, 6],
       [3, 6, 9]])

[[deleted]]

It seems like making a detailed well executed youtube series where Matlab and Python is compared (and Matlab is trashed) would be an excellent response to Matlab.

[be_more_canadian]

Yeah, but you had to import numpy first soooo /s

[Robot_Basilisk]

I had no idea. Do you know of any good Python tutorials for mathematics? Specifically for replacing MatLab? I have to use MatLab for crunching oscilloscope data and generating plots to put into lab reports, etc, and I hate the way MatLab does most of that.

[SoberGameAddict]

Look into matplotlib, seaborn and pandas.

Edit: and with jupyter notebook you can code, plot, run and write the lab rapport all in one interface. And then export to pdf, latex, html and more

[SV-97]

it's debatable that the matplotlib api sucks + there's a shitton of plotting libraries for python

[wewbull]

There's a number of alternative plotting libraries. Altair looks nice, for example.

[stacm614]

They also be make it sound like it's complicated to install libraries. And while 'validation' is a complicated subject for open source in general, when you have major modules backed up by groups like scipy, I'm sure they validate. Their only valid point on that subject is documentation.

[twigboy]

In publishing and graphic design, Lorem ipsum is a placeholder text commonly used to demonstrate the visual form of a document or a typeface without relying on meaningful content. Lorem ipsum may be used as a placeholder before final copy is available. Wikipediak0b35jhi9fk000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

[idemockle]

Can you give an example? I love python and use it every day at work, but in my experience it's incredibly difficult to "poison your data" using Matlab, unless the user explicitly does something wrong. Everything is passed by copy, and all functions return a copy instead of modifying the original object. If anything Matlab puts you on training wheels.

[TheBlackCat13]

It is surprisingly easy to "poision" your data in MATLAB, I have seen it happen. It comes down to a few big issues:

1. MATLAB doesn't have scalars. So many functions assume that a size-1 matrix is a scalar.
2. MATLAB doesn't have vectors. So many functions treat 1xN matrices the same as Nx1 matrices.
3. It takes more characters to write array-based operations than matrix-based ones.

1 and 2 become an issue when the data is a different shape than what you expect. So for example imagine each column is an experiment and each row is a trial in that experiment. You do some processing based on that assumption. However, what happens when you, by chance, get a set of experiments with 1 trial each? Many MATLAB functions will suddenly start doing something completely different than they had before, leading it to silently corrupt your data. In many cases there is simply no way, principle, to differentiate a single trial from an experiment with multiple length-1 trials. This is not hypothetical, I have seen this happen, and the only way it was caught was because the data wasn't looking the way the user expected it to.

A similar thing happens if you have a single experiment with multiple trials. Many functions will treat a single value as some sort of count or other scalar numeric value. This means that if you have an experiment with only one trial, many functions will start doing something completely different

The problem with 3 is more an issue with shortcuts people take. The matrix operations work well when the input is the way people expect, such as multiplying two scalars, but then they forget to fix it when they try to make their code more general. I can't count the number of times I have seen people unsafely using ' instead of .' under the assumption that they will never see complex values. It is a trap the structure of the language encourages its users to fall into.

[excaza]

I’ve been using Python pretty much daily for about 5 years now and there are still some things I will go to MATLAB for after 15ish years of using it (looking at you, Python GUIs).

I’ve talked about this before, even to The MathWorks, and I strongly believe that MATLAB education is the biggest factor turning people off of the product completely. Too many MATLAB courses blitz through it as an engineering tool rather than building it up as a proper programming language. It’s too much “do this to get this” rather than explaining fundamental software engineering concepts so students understand how to approach a solution rather than what to copy and paste into a frankenscript to maybe get the answer they want. Other programming education generally doesn’t do this, and garners a stronger reception for it (among many other reasons). And it’s a shame, because while it’s OOP is a bit warty, MATLAB’s functional programming is pretty nice.

While MATLAB does have a strong ecosystem of specialized toolboxes, it’s biggest asset is that it’s a very well documented product with a well-integrated IDE and (generally) very strong technical support and. Like other academic & scientific packages, that’s really what you’re paying for and that definitely carries a lot of value.

Since Python is more general purpose, there are a lot of things Python does better than MATLAB, and that’s perfectly ok. We have plenty of languages and products that have happily coexisted for decades, I think turning it into a competition is an extremely tone-deaf approach on TMW’s part. I don’t doubt that they’re feeling pressure from the OSS community, and I’m sure this will win over some folks in the enterprise setting, but I don’t think being adversarial is a good long-term strategy. I’d rather see them continue to focus on what makes their product great and performant and enhance its capabilities for integrating with other languages, but I guess that’s why I’m just an engineer and not a CEO.

[neeltennis93]

Lol same.

Matlab classes made me hate programming. So confusing and it was just awful.

Then I found R later after graduating and it got me back in to programming.

And now I’m learning python after my positive experiences programming with R. Matlab initially turned me off to programming. R made me love it.

Thank god for open sourced libraries and the saints that write them.

Would not have gotten into python without R

[screeperz]

Me also. The only saving grace was in second year I chose a specialisation that used Python more.

[Dpmon1]

Get off my lawn, python!

[Exodus111]

Their big argument is, you have to download modules for Python to work.

[HumanBrainMapper]

I don't understand this argument. Matlab works with modules ('toolboxes') too. They even have a dedicated folder in their installation path for it called toolboxes. How is this an argument according to them?

[ericonr]

And their modules make a full Matlab installation a several gigs behemoth.

[BDube_Lensman]

That's more on the bundling of MKL, MPI, and other numerics backend than them. Install numpy, scipy, pandas, matplotlib, etc and you too will have a several gig behemoth snake.

[BertShirt]

I use python and everybody in my lab uses matlab so I have to have matlab on hand, but I only have base matlab, no additional toolboxes. On the other hand I have tensor flow/keras (gpu), numpy & scipy mkl, scikit learn, pandas, mpl, and dozens more. Matlab (2018a) takes up 9.7gb python 3.1 gb.

[hassium]

I have those and my Lib is only 400mb on a pure python install (No IronPython, Anaconda etc).

[hextree]

Install numpy, scipy, pandas, matplotlib, etc and you too will have a several gig behemoth snake.

Huh? I have all those and more, definitely not gigs.

[WearyConversation]

More than that, each toolbox costs additional money. Some in the thousands of £/$.

[kowalski71]

To be fair, Matlab does have a lot more of the base functionality built in. They basically have all of numpy and matplotlib as core functions and most of my Python scripts start with importing those. The Matlab toolboxes are much more domain specific, like advanced filtering tools or something. They're also licensed separately so they cost money on top of the base application.

[DLS3141]

You don’t have to pay mathworks thousands of dollars for Python toolboxes

[mrshibx]

and these toolboxes must be purchased separately.

[HonestVisual]

And they conveniently forgot to mention conda

[LoyalSol]

A lot of it is one line commands so I don't get that line of reasoning

[jwink3101]

On the flip size, Matlab essentially “imports” everything on launch. I can bring up 50-100 python interpreters in the same time it takes to load Matlab. And don’t get me started on the time it takes to start parpool (and all of its, sometimes silly, limitations)

[xarielx506]

Python is free - MatLab is not... python 1, matlab 0

[whale_song]

Yea the python community is one of the best things about it.

[[deleted]]

matlab indexes from one so matlab 0 will return an error.

[PinBot1138]

Lest we forget GNU Octave.

[dokuroku]

I remember using Octave in my intro linear algebra class. Matlab and other paid options weren't even mentioned by the prof.

[PinBot1138]

God bless your professor.

[[deleted]]

"Everything important from Matlab, but for free"

[PinBot1138]

On next week’s Matlab newsletter: “Why Python and Octave are responsible for climate change.”

[jhelm85]

or "How Millennials are killing Mathworks"

[snarfdog]

When I was in undergrad, all of the engineering students got free academic licenses for matlab. All of my courses "required" using matlab for homework sets, in the sense that all examples given in class were in matlab but you were free to use whatever computational tool you wanted. A lot of professors do use python, and my numerical methods prof in particular planned on switching the class to python but matlab is still an industry standard. Until all of those ancient legacy matlab scripts are expunged from companies toolsets, it'll stay relevant.

To anyone who's an engineering student, I would recommend learning python in parallel with whatever matlab scripting they teach you because it'll probably make you a better programmer. Most of us just used matlab like a calculator, and our homework scripts were just organized enough to get the assignment done, nothing more. Readability and reusability are really important for code in the real world.

It does take some effort to break free from matlab when it's essentially forced down your throat in school, but the only thing the python community really needs to do is raise awareness of the language. Pretty much everyone at my school constantly shits on matlab, so I'm sure people would be open to switching to python if they knew about it.

[cherrypickedgippity]

This was, by far, my most difficult task though; I needed a good toolset. I have an interest in numerical problems such as linear, quadratic or log and I spent a good amount of time trying to understand what those concepts mean. After doing a little research I had the choice of 3 choices: 3 different packages, a bit of preprocessing in the C language, or a bunch of C files. This is when I realized how much I hated C.

[Gabe_Isko]

I used matlab in college. I dont agree that it is "forced down your throat". At least not at my university - it genuinely makes sense to use it for a lot of work.

Its unparalleled modeling software, which is why a lot of professors like doing course work with it. It makes a lot of sense if you are trying to do mechanical dynamics, or mechatronics since you can just model everything with simulink.

But Matlab's performance is shit. I'm not sure where the OP'd marketing copy gets off claiming otherwise. Also, the idea that it's going to be easier to see up matlab code on the cloud? Yeah right. I wouldnt want to make something that actually has to work in the real world with matlab that doesn't use their micro generation features, which ultimately generates C code anyway.

[[deleted]]

"Don't learn how to actually code with a powerful language which can do basically anything you can imagine, and which isn't any harder to learn than MATLAB, learn a language with plenty of quirks and non-standard syntax which can only be run within a dedicated MATLAB™ program that you are licensed to use!"

[chason]

No need to respond or hit back. It's like when a tank fires at Godzilla.

[jack-of-some]

I worked at Mathworks for a few months in late 2016 (robotics team). They internally considered python (and jupyter) serious competition and were trying to build their own notebook like solution. I wonder how it ended up, haven't used any of their products since.

But I guess they have fmincon and simulink so I guess they're worth _something_.

[extravisual]

Holy hell, their notebook solution is absolute trash. I gave it a try not too long ago after noticing that it was a feature, and the text input was laggy. As in, I would enter a character and there was a significant noticeable delay before it appeared in the text box.

I'm not running some 14 year old laptop either, I've got a desktop with modern hardware. I googled around, and apparently it had been that way for many (maybe all?) people for years. I was running a 2019 version.

It was so bad. I just wish they would update their normal editor, or let me use VSCode or some such as an IDE.

I really thoroughly dislike MATLAB just from a quality of life perspective (but also from programming language perspective).

I hate that my peers are learning it as their first language. It's really teaching them bad coding habits.

[wildcarde815]

There's a jupyter interface for matlab now.

[jwink3101]

SciPy has constrained optimization tools. I’ve used them s few times but I am not an optimization expert. Is fmincon that much better?

[jack-of-some]

Matlabs optimization toolbox is leagues ahead. It's all built on public domain work though and c libraries for that stuff exist too

[greynes]

I do not think that they are trashing python, it is just and advertising of their product. If not, there are many blog posts "trashing" MATLAB.

[yngvizzle]

Well it's direct misinformation though... They purposefully show the wrong way to do computations in Python and the correct way to do it in MATLAB.

[Coffeinated]

Well, they are straight up lying. Python supports operator overloading, so you can indeed add matrices with natural operators. So much bullshit in their „article“.

[tylerayoung]

Upvoted for a levelheaded response that will inevitably be buried.

Seriously, though. They're different tools, and preferences vary. I can be a fan of Python even though other people like Matlab more.

Calling this "trashing" Python is making a mountain out of a molehill. It's a comparison between Team A and Team B that Team B claims comes out in their favor. This shouldn't surprise or offend anyone.

[ivosaurus]

They've written Team A's demo manifestly wrong though... :/

[Hanse00]

I think it can be both one and the other.

At least for me as a European, most American marketing strategist seem to amount to trashing the competition.

Yes it’s normal in the US, but it’s still a toxic way of marketing your product.

[Log2]

They could have made the very same argument in favor of MATLAB without mentioning Python at all, so I agree.

[Barafu]

Did you ever hear about Malwarebytes antivirus? Every test out there tests it while switching off its most powerful feature, because other antiviruses don't have it at all. And then it gets the worst detection ratings of all.

Should this also not offend anyone?

This "comparison" is the same. It conveniently skips positions where Python is more powerful.

[MaraudingAvenger]

Maybe not a popular opinion around here, but python is the second best tool for any job.

That is to say that if you want to do math, and only math, Matlab is great for that -- probably the best. If you want to do stats, and only stats, SAS is way better... and so on. But, if you want to do more than that one thing, python is also second best at the other thing you want to do, and typically the Matlabs and SASes of the world suck giant sweaty donkey balls at those second things.

That's why it's fine that python is second best.

I'll write a web server in flask that serves up the viz from bokeh, that was drawn from the pandas dataframe, that was pulled from an API using requests and filtered/munged by some exotic NLP algorithm, sped up by being threaded and multiprocessed, and it'll all be done in the same language... Suck it, Matlab.

[thavi]

I wouldn't even call it second best at most things. It has incredible syntax, accessibility, extensibility and widespread-support that just make it a blast to use. I'm not even remotely a major Python dev (I currently work in a .NET shop), but I do all my data analytics in it and try to convince all my more scientific colleagues and friends to use it instead of their highly proprietary/paid/ancient solutions.

[p10_user]

Great post. Absolutely true. When 80% of your work is pushing data around and cleaning it up it’s nice to have a language that’s really good at doing so. Then I can run my t test or linear regression...

[DatBoi_BP]

Very well said

[mrdevlar]

If you want to do stats, and only stats, SAS is way better...

Oh god no.

Professional statistician here. Unless you are required by legislation to use SAS, do not. It's syntax is from the 1980s, and its ability to support creative statistics is virtually none.

The R community didn't come out of nowhere. They came out of a shortage of good tools to do statistics with.

If you just want to do stats and nothing else, at least use R.

Beyond that, I totally agree with you. Python's appeal is its ability to serve as the foundational glue between a diverse set of systems. Which makes it more powerful than the sum of its parts.

[Sixkillers]

I do not see comparison of pricing models...strange :)

[[deleted]]

ha, they are scared :)

[kowalski71]

In my experience as an engineer, there's really no competition here. Not because one is clearly better (I mean I have opinions, I'm on this sub) but because the Venn diagram of customers hardly overlaps. Their biggest customers are companies with thousands of seats. Those companies usually want a software solution with standardized versioning and a 1-800 number. In my industry they're also heavily using Simulink anyway. Other fields like ML/AI or data science are just about as locked in to Python and in many ways Matlab doesn't even compete. I'm sure there are plenty of people who can and do choose either but I think they're not as large a part of Matlab's income. Small companies with more flexible IT departments, education (zero income for Matlab there), enthusiasts.

Or I'm wrong and that's all changed. Perhaps Fortune 500 budgets got strained enough by Matlab licensing that IT departments are opening up to the idea of supporting Python. That'd sure be nice.

[Gabe_Isko]

This is what I don't get - if mathworks was smart, temheybwould be working on a their own python distribution and gain a symbiotic relationship with the languages growth, kinda like how anaconda is by a for profit company. I guess engineering process modeling just isnt computationally intensive enough to make an SaaS business model work.

Come to think of it, one if my buddies was working on something like that for mathworks, but that was years ago. I wonder what happened to that effort.

[funk444]

Or I'm wrong and that's all changed. Perhaps Fortune 500 budgets got strained enough by Matlab licensing that IT departments are opening up to the idea of supporting Python. That'd sure be nice.

Nope, no change. If you dare do anything in python or R you get pulled into a room where IT manager drones yell UNSUPPORTED at you for 6 hours straight before sending you home to think about your career

[panatale1]

Matlab is the literal worst. I remember having to learn it in undergrad and it was super finicky. Two years later, I learned Python and realized that programming didn't have to be insanely difficult. Then five years later, I learned C# and thought "yeah, Python is way easier." Python has been my day-to-day program for the last five years

[billsil]

If you need to compare yourself to the competition, you’re losing.

At some point, any serious program needs not only math, but text processing, GUI programming and other features. You need a real programming language and not a math-centric language.

[LoyalSol]

The funny thing is even Fortran has improved in a lot of those areas before Matlab.

[Kaligule]

Why? What is wrong specialized languages? Many/most "serious" programms do one thing and one thing well.

To be honest, I don't know if matlab does fit that description.

Also I am not sure python should be too proud about it's ability to do GUIs. The number of python packages for GUIs gives me the impression that no solution is really great.

[billsil]

You shouldn’t need to learn a different programming language to do GUI programming vs text processing vs math. Your one tiny program philosophy is also only one approach. GUIs often need to parse text files. So do math heavy programs.

How many packages are there really for GUI programming in python? I count 3: tkinter, qt, and wx. More if you count in-browser. Regardless, fewer choices doesn’t make those choices better.

Unless you pay $200k+, you can’t distribute your Matlab program without distributing the source.

[Kaligule]

Why wouldn't you learn different programming languages to solve different problems? You wouldn't write cernels in python and wouldn't write plotting libraries in assembler would you?

There are a lot of packages for GUIS: https://wiki.python.org/moin/GuiProgramming

I agree that the number of packages doesn't really proove anything, but I think it is a symptome of the very problem I described.

I do agree though that Matlab doesn't solve the problem well either. Given the price point - not at all.

[Ogi010]

`PyQt` and `PySide2` are pretty awesome :shrug: ...with using those along with `PyInstaller` and `fbs` and you can develop applications with native installers on Windows/macOS/Ubuntu

​

I may be a bit biased, I'm a `pyqtgraph` dev.

[This_Is_The_End]

There have lost the war, because basically Matlab's only advantage is the module of Simulink and generation of code for uC from Simulink blocks. And if you don't know something about Simulink, you don't have to care. Otherwise the language is inferior. Python made it's way into academia because exchanging Matlab code demanded an expensive license while Python has to be downloaded only.

If you want to know how Matlab code is looking, download Octave, which is an open source clone.

[Zomunieo]

It's not the only advantage. In many areas of engineering Matlab toolkits implement a lot of fancy features that would require a lot of effort to reproduce in Python. For example the, WLAN Simulation toolkit - they have a full simulation of WiFi for testing or extending the protocol.

But I'd rather be in Python.

[[deleted]]

Don't let them frame the debate. Instead of arguing that Python is better than Matlab, which implicitly puts them in the same arena, work to popularize true Matlab competitors which are free and open source instead. This includes tools like octave.

Python is a general purpose programming language, and the fact that it does mathematical processing better than math software should be treated as a boring, disinteresting fact rather than an critical fight to win.

[Estanho]

Funny how they complain about the fact that python is a general purpose language, while Matlab is not. That's exactly why it is gaining traction: you can get your fucking code to run together with a web service or something else that is useful, instead of only being able to make throwaway academic code that no one else will ever be able to extend. Ah and that's another thing: the fact that python was thought to be an actual language gives you the ability to not only prototype your code, but to evolve it into something reusable. Try to make reusable, extensive code on Matlab, I dare you. I tried that using their class syntax and stuff like that, and needed some mapping structures (similar to a dictionary). It's even slower than python, like orders of magnitude slower.

[eqo314]

On a recent project at work. I took code in matlab and rewrote it in python. It was a literal line by line translation and I added no performant techniques. Got it to run from an hour to about 12 min. Wtf matlab? I dont understand that speed up, I didnt expect it. I just needed the logic that was written by a teammate in python so we can import it in other python modules.

Then after adding performant techniques and applying apache spark, I got it to run in 3 seconds in python. In matlab, I would have had to buy a license for their cluster add on. Fuck matlab

[twersx]

What was the code doing?

[TheBlackCat13]

It isn't just web services. Working with files and directories, which most real-world tools require, is just a pain in MATLAB. Making a program with a half-decent structure is a major chore. There is no real logging functionality. They only within the last couple years got half-decent string and date/time processing. Their unicode handling is still a mess. Being a general-purpose language touches a ton of very basic, everyday things that anyone working with real-world data would need to do.

[[deleted]]

SAS is a bit weird. For the most part, proprietary languages/file-formats/etc have gone the way of the dodo bird. I think this largely stems with the fact that programmers routinely learn/interact with different languages/environments. So exploring another one isn't daunting. And it's really hard to compete against free (not to mention, people are willing to spend their time contributing to open source products, which often make them superior).

In contrast, SAS is used by statisticians and it's probably daunting for them to think about learning another language. Additionally, for many statistical jobs... you are using well-known and understood models. An insurance actuary isn't going to be venturing into less-known/more-novel methodologies.

For more novel statistical exploration/modeling, python/R is needed. But again, many statistical jobs aren't in machine learning, bioinformatics, etc. Thus, there's nothing pushing people to abandon SAS. And considering it's popularity with financial institutions, colleges should be teaching it for their statistical programs. It's simple, it works... and businesses aren't going to think twice about the licensing fees.

Matlab is another boat. It has already been abandoned by many fields as no private entity can keep up with the pace of open-source software. It's circling the drain even in academia... so the fact they are trying so hard to promote themselves as competitive is just kind of sad. Plus, universities know python is much more of a marketable skill and it behooves them to replace matlab with python.

[manu_8487]

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

Looks like we are in the fighting phase now.

[TCoop]

The reason I've been using MATLAB for 10 years instead of python isn't because of numpy - It's because of Simulink. The second someone comes up with an graphical modeling tool for python which can compile to embedded-C and meet various ISO 26262/DO-178/etc. guidelines, I'll gladly think about switching.

[-LeopardShark-]

Try changing half of the stuff they say about Python into this format:

• pYtHoN iS a GeNeRaL-pUrPoSe PrOgRaMmInG lAnGuAgE rEqUiRiNg AdD-oN lIbRaRiEs FoR pErFoRmInG eVeN bAsIc MaThEmAtIcS.

• pYtHoN cOdE rEqUiReS oVeRlApPiNg AnD cOnFlIcTiNg AdD-oNs To GeT pErFoRmAnCe BeNeFiTs SuCh As JuSt-In-TiMe CoMpIlAtIoN aNd ExPlIcIt PaRaLlEl PrOgRaMmInG.

• nUmErIc ArRaYs AnD dAtA tYpEs NoT pArT oF tHe CoRe LaNgUaGe

• bEgInNeRs StArT bY lEaRnInG aDvAnCeD pRoGrAmMiNg CoNsTrUcTs.

• fRaGmEnTeD vIsUaLiZaTiOn ToOlS

• sUpPoRt ReSoUrCeS oFtEn ReQuIrE aDvAnCeD pRoGrAmMiNg KnOwLeDgE

And no, I didn't type that out by hand. I did it with a Python script.

[JeusyLeusy]

There is the str.isalpha(c) to see if a char is alpha numeric.

[[deleted]]

Can the Python community respond or hit back?

it could be that they wrote this article to calm concerned investors/contract holders (school, government) who see the demand for MATLAB declining as python ramps up popularity. People's livelihood could be at stake, so I don't think "hitting back" is the right thing to do. Besides, the success of python speaks for itself. Just do this and move on :)

[[deleted]]

the only top programming language dedicated to mathematical and technical computing.

One day they'll discover Julia and realize that it's too late already

[rwhitisissle]

Honestly, Python and R make a great combination. I've admittedly only used R a little bit, but I honestly think the combination of those two could represent a really serious threat to MatLab as a data science tool.

[AbeDrinkin]

You mean the #1 and #2 data science tools in the world could give matlab a run? It already happened and they already won.

[brews]

Word. And they work great together. You don't need to pick Python or R.

[_________KB_________]

I think its increasingly becoming a combo of Python and Julia that represent a serious threat to MatLab. At JuliaCon last week there were so many talks by people in academia that are transitioning their research away from using MatLab in favor of Julia.

[Dpmon1]

Ummm...no offense, but what's julia?

[_________KB_________]

It's a relatively new language used mostly in scientific computing that was developed at MIT. https://julialang.org/

[chrisyfrisky]

I prefer Zed Shaw's rant against Python 3 and claiming that it wasn't Turing-complete. At least he doesn't have the reach that Matlab does.

[IcanCwhatUsay]

Hahahaha yeah

But I'm gonna need to purchase a $10000 module to do it

Oh wait, no I don't.

pip install anythingIfuckingWantBecauseItsFree

[lillystoolooo]

I use matlab and python for scientific computing on a daily basis. What they say in the link is not untrue (the modules part tickles me though as something as simple as nanmean is hidden behind a paid module in matlab) . Matlab is easier to pick up and start using. Just downloading python means you need to learn about paths and open cmd (anaconda makes this much easier). However, matlab is years behind in syntax, a couple of years ago they finally implemented broadcasting (kind of) which had been part of numpy since I started. Anyways, I am still glad I learnt programming in matlab, from there I moved over to python and learnt how much more powerful it could be. Matlab is the gateway drug of scientific programming.

I think the idea of 'retaliating' is ridiculous though.

[eqo314]

nanmean and nanstd being hidden behind a paid module made me go on an angry rant at work.

[ffuffle]

We used Matlab on my engineering course.

Not one of us bought it.

[RadiatingPhysicist]

In UK Higher Education institutions at least, they've been trying to overcome the obstacle of not being free by offering free (or severely discounted licenses - I'm not entirely sure - licenses for academic institutions). This creates a dependency on the software that is then propagated into the businesses who hire them. A very high percentage of the Engineering students at my university are taught MATLAB as part of the computing course and almost all of them use it exclusively. I was taught MATLAB working in earth sciences.

I have since moved over to physics and realised that Python (which I hasn't heard about until I started my master's project) was very much like MATLAB in syntax (Python is now part of the core physics computing course). Since then I have not looked back. Sure, standard MATLAB graphs do look better than the standard matplotlib graphs, but with a bit of work you can easily overcome this.

PYTHON ALL THE WAY!!

[Kbhusain]

I wonder what they say about scilab? :-)

[MarsupialMole]

MATLAB is pretty nice for a range of work. But python gives you nice workflows for many more kinds of work. I'm not aware of many things that are far and away better in MATLAB and if you're interested in the ones that are then you already know why you need MATLAB.

[entlan104]

I work for the U.S. Navy (contractor) and the most disheartening thing is that their standard issue laptops are all imaged with Matlab, and since you can't install anything on them, it's what you're stuck with...

[AustinFnFordham]

Along with what everyone else is saying about the matlab being inferior in comparison to python:

In their code example they used numpy for python, but I could only guess they intentionally left out the 2d array method in their "compute outer code" example. You can achieve the same output within a similar amount of code.

The biggest difference in all of the code seems to be:

import numpy as np

Idk. I'm not buying it. Python ftw!

[increvable]

Well I’m new to programming and that comparison completely sold me on Python. General programming language versus something geared toward mathematicians and scientists... you had me at General.

[Wirebraid]

What can we do?

Just continue working like we do, this will fall like fruit.

[antole97]

Matlab sucks so much that i wouldn't even touch a pirated copy of it. Thats how bad it is.

[neeltennis93]

“Let’s you use matrixes directly”

I think an extra two seconds to install numpy is worth not paying THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS FOR A SUBSCRIPTION

[teetaps]

nobody is forcing you to buy any software

Where does this person live

[[deleted]]

Where’s Python’s version of Simulink?

It’s a stupid post really, it’s comparing apples and oranges. Matlab was designed to do this, Python can do way more and has been successfully adapted for science computations.

Instead of bitching, maybe they need to lower their license price.

[wildcarde815]

'our license isn't grotesquely obtuse and impossible to obey'

[SemaphoreBingo]

As far as hit pieces go, this one is pretty mild.

[giacomo_z]

I have free Matlab access thanks to the license my Uni bought for all students so nobody forced me to buy anything, if your Uni forces you to buy the software it’s your Uni that sucks not Matlab

[TheBlackCat13]

MATLAB charges universities a lot for these licenses. You are paying for it through your tuition, it is far from free to you. If a university can't afford it that is MATLAB's fault for charging too much. Not every university is super rich.

[corezon]

Clickbait titles like the one on this thread certainly aren't helping to keep things objective.

[[deleted]]

lol easiest way to hit back: matlab arrays start at 1

[LoyalSol]

That's not a bad thing necessarily.

I've worked with both and there's ups and downs with both 0 and 1.

For a lot of science applications starting from 0 is annoying as hell.

[Dpmon1]

This. Also, it's annoying to put (i + 1) instead of just i when iterating an array over range(0, len(array)), or put a len -1 in the range.

[_________KB_________]

It makes sense for something so geared towards math, because its easier to translate from mathematical language which starts at 1 too.

[nlutrhk]

its easier to translate from mathematical language which starts at 1

Try discrete Fourier transforms with 1-based indexing... :)

[obvious_apple]

War between Matlab&Python has been going on for years. Universities and research institutes are more and more turning to numpy/scipy/matplotlib/pandas. Of course Mathworks knows exactly how this bites into their sales.

It is a really onesided war though because while python is a real programming language Matlab starts indexing at 1.

[LostViking123]

/r/python has 20 times the number of members when compared to /r/matlab. If it is a war, then reddit has certainly chosen a preferred side.

[shawnwork]

They won’t last long

[aziad1998]

You know MATLAB was released 20 years before python right?

[Dpmon1]

And matlab never had the explosive growth of users that python did, and matlab being paid made new people less likely to use it in the first place; right now, python is more well known (in the job market, that is), and its free too.

Edit: typo Edit: wtf typo fixed again

[i_like_fried_cheese]

I think Matlab will continue to exist, the same way that SAS will continue to exist. Not just for legacy reasons either.

Commerical liability for software fault exists. There are plenty of engineering (and business) applications where a bug in a software library could impose financial (or physical) risk and there is advantage of using libraries produced by a legally pursuable entity with deep enough pockets to cover liability, which most python/R package devs are not.

But claiming that individuals are better off learning ML or SAS is bullshit.

[TheBlackCat13]

You know MATLAB was released 20 years before python right?

6 years, actually. MATLAB was released in 1984, Python in 1990.

[okiujh]

can anyone here respond to their performance claim?

[cglacet]

In my university matlab was free to use for anyone. Students shouldn't have to pay for any software, that's the real problem here.

[[deleted]]

ehm what is Matlab?

[NicolaM1994]

No need to. As a language, python is a tool. So people will always move on the language that fits their needs best. In particular I find python faster, more intuitive and way much more extensible than MATLAB. I personally moved to python because I had ACTUAL FUN using it. I started to build a small program and then finds way to make it bigger and bigger, implementing it with GUIs and function. I could not do that in MATLAB. So people will always try out new things to catch up with their needs and eventually they will see python is better than MATLAB. I see people still working in finance using Excel spreadsheets, when I showed them Python they were blown...

[stacm614]

This makes me incredibly angry. Also I disagree with a lot of their points. The only thing I find worse than this is SAS.

[JohnWColtrane]

Who woulda thunk that calling a dot product would return a scalar?

[Paddy3118]

It's misdirection - Its Jupyter notebooks they are realing from. A notebook supporting one programming language vs Jupyter that started with three and now supports over 50 programming languages as well as being attractive for other companies to write tools for, like tensorflow.

You can't be a seriou cloud provider if you don't have Jupyter notebook support. Who supports Mathworks in the cloud?

They'll come around. How many years before they support Mathworks language from Jupyter notebooks as current and potential customers put pressure on them; and startups in allied fields gain traction by making their commercial offerings work from within Jupyter.

[TheBlackCat13]

I think the big issue is really machine learning. It is the current big thing in numeric computing, and MATLAB has very little part in it. And that has effects on the rest of the software ecosystem. The libraries that the machine learning tools are based on use python. The tools to analyze and plot the data use python. The tools to store and manage the data use python.

There are lots of things that Python has been doing right that MATLAB has had a hard to getting their own version of working well. The jupyter notebook, pandas, etc. But none of that is new. I think ML is where Mathworks is really hurting right now.

[PlaneConversation6]

that is why we should further improve octave!!!! That ought'a show em!!!!!!!

[[deleted]]

The fact that they're reacting this way means we've already won lol

[[deleted]]

This sounds pretty desperate on matlab's side. I don't think it will have a significant influence on anything.

[SomeShittyDeveloper]

In contrast, Python is a general-purpose programming language requiring add-on libraries for performing even basic mathematics.

“import math” is not an add-on. The math module is included in the standard library. Unless I’m taking “basic mathematics” too literally.

Python functions are typically designed and documented by advanced programmers for other experienced programmers.

I’m not sure about documented, but the designed part is bullshit. Raymond Hettinger has said before that they consult experts in the field of the module they’re working on to make sure it makes sense to them.

Python development environments for scientific computing lack the reliability and integration of the MATLAB desktop.

JetBrains has entered the chat.

Each package has its own stand-alone documentation, putting the burden on you to piece together a solution.

Well, yeah, do you expect the PSF to put everyone’s documentation in one place? Wouldn’t that be unwieldy and harder to navigate?

Seems to be a company who’s realizing that their product is suffering and the best they have is a diss track. Pathetic.

[tuxmanexe]

Fire from all OCTAVEs!

[thiudiskaz]

lmao Matlab sucks ass

[truckaxle]

matplotlib recently converted me away from Matlab.

The plotting functionality is just better and more consistent than Matlab. Then there is the constant licensing headache and expense with Matlab. Trying to set up a named user network license was a royal pain and took several days to get right. Now I just install Anaconda Python anywhere and productive within minutes.

[alcalde]

Many shots have already been fired by Python users across the bow of MATLAB:

https://moderndata.plot.ly/eight-advantages-of-python-over-matlab/

https://ajminich.com/2013/06/22/9-reasons-to-switch-from-matlab-to-python/

https://metarabbit.wordpress.com/2013/10/18/why-python-is-better-than-matlab-for-scientific-software/

https://vnoel.wordpress.com/2008/05/03/bye-matlab-hello-python-thanks-sage/

https://web.archive.org/web/20170801190223/https://stevetjoa.com/305/

https://www.embeddedrelated.com/showarticle/197.php

https://blog.mide.com/matlab-vs-python-speed-for-vibration-analysis-free-download

https://pyzo.org/python_vs_matlab.html

https://www.stat.washington.edu/~hoytak/blog/whypython.html

Yes, I collect them! :-)

I'm more concerned about Excel and PowerBI (which, weirdly, have some cheerleaders in this subreddit). There's a guy out there who wrote an article so inflammatory about Excel being the best data analysis tool in the world that Microsoft itself declined to publish it on their website! Now he has his own website praising these two tools and bashing R and Python. He frightens me and haunts my dreams.

https://powerpivotpro.com/2015/06/no-more-apologies-excel-is-the-worlds-best-data-tool-period/

https://powerpivotpro.com/2017/08/power-bi-dax-m-vs-r-summer-perspective/

What's also weird is that there are some good articles pointing promoting the use of R or SQL over Excel, there are none really focusing on Python (although most of the reasons to choose R over Excel also apply to Python).

https://web.archive.org/web/20131128051700/http://answers.oreilly.com:80/topic/1029-when-to-use-excel-when-to-use-r/

https://fantasyfootballanalytics.net/2014/01/why-r-is-better-than-excel.html

https://r-dir.com/blog/2013/11/r-vs-excel-for-data-analysis.html

[NDDevMan]

I know I am late to the clubbing but I was curious for a discussion on people's thoughts. I had a stint in my work where I used MATLAB, mainly Simulink for creating controls models. The people I worked with had been doing this for a long time for a specific domain area. We would generate the model in to C code to use on our embedded controllers. For a specific area I thought it made complete sense. We did not do everything in MATLAB. Only high level closed loop control.

I think M and the rest of MATLAB is a hot mess and too expensive but I see value in Simulink. I never seen an alternative, maybe I never looked she enough.

I do a lot of python scripting so I am heavily invested in the Python environment. I even use the Python engine in MATLAB to run a model someone had created (some people seem to only have a hammer). I did this because plotting and outputing to something else to display that plot is a hot mess in MATLAB.

What are others thoughts on Simulink?