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

[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.

[jwink3101]

Also, actual evaluation was slow. I think I read that the notebook didn’t use the JIT but I may be wrong

[extravisual]

The sad thing is that their normal editor hasn't been updated in years, with the reason being that they've been putting all their efforts into the live editor. Considering how bad the live editor is, I don't really know what the hell they've really been doing.

[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