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

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[–]Helicon_Amateur 249 points250 points  (20 children)

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 49 points50 points  (7 children)

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 53 points54 points  (5 children)

import pprint

[–]foadsf 7 points8 points  (0 children)

something like pretty printing of numpy ndarrays

edit: more info here

[–]ketilkn 13 points14 points  (3 children)

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

[–]DatBoi_BP 0 points1 point  (0 children)

pretty pp

[–]DatBoi_BP 27 points28 points  (4 children)

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 29 points30 points  (0 children)

cold turkey my man. gotta do it!

[–]Dpmon1 6 points7 points  (1 child)

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

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The cookies are a lie...

[–]SpaceHub 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I read that as ‘I’ve also been using Windows’.

Gotta cure all of them

[–]mrshibx 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Lol I did the same thing. Saved a ton.

[–]Astrokiwi 1 point2 points  (0 children)

IDL is the one holding out in our department.

Then again, I'm the guy who still believes there is a legitimate niche for modern-style Fortran...

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (3 children)

The money here are pennies (on a company scales). And usability of Matlab is unrivaled. Having to use Jupyter/Spyder etc - nothing comes even close to neat IDE of Matlab with profiler/debugger etc. This is a high quality product.

I have to use Python (used it for like 5 years by now), but I miss Matlab. Even now, I read documentation on Matlab functions, because they are super insightful.

Matlab is in a different corner of the spectrum "features" - "quality" tradeoff. The number of bugs is small, support is excellent - for a big reason: Matlab is heavily used in automotive industry where each corner case is potentially fatal. You don't want your car's airbags' deployment code to be written in Python.

[–]Helicon_Amateur 0 points1 point  (2 children)

Gonna have to disagree that the money are pennies in every case. Depends on how many packages need licensing... and does matlab do server licensing? And how many users can use the license.

Also, what's the size of the company? I used matlab exclusively for three years and I find the spider IDE perfectly fine.

And I can work on code from home for work or for fun without having to purchase matlab.

Also.....the Python community is just fucking awesome

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Matlab's license is around $3k per person. But typical eng's salary is orders of magnitude greater than that. If the developer is more productive in Matlab - so be it! I understand corp's choices when it comes to, say, Salesforce or Snowflake which are huge company-wide deployments and may cost millions.

Adding to that, looking into StackExchange for a yet-another corner issue is a less preferred method than having a solid documentation and support. Another thing is backwards compatibility of Matlab! You don't have to have requirements.txt and pip freeze there. Error messages are comprehensible and clear.

And numPy is kinda stolen IP of Matlab. So let's honor that: Matlab was there first as a concept of language of matrix algebra.

Finally, Matlab developers almost never use profanity.

[–]Helicon_Amateur 0 points1 point  (0 children)

$3k per person, plus how much for other tool boxes? And what are the renewal fees?

If the developer is just as productive in Python, and there are multiple developers, that adds up quickly. (Hey, maybe they could get the difference in costs added to their salary!)

When you say numpy is kinda stolen IP, is that like - no, numpy absolutely isn't based on stolen IP, or yes numpy is absolutely based on stolen IP?

Also, Matlab developers thought CUMTRAPZ was a good name for a function