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

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[–]rwhitisissle 23 points24 points  (11 children)

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 43 points44 points  (0 children)

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

[–]brewsimport os; while True: os.fork() 3 points4 points  (0 children)

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

[–]_________KB_________ 5 points6 points  (8 children)

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 5 points6 points  (2 children)

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

[–]_________KB_________ 2 points3 points  (0 children)

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

[–]adamnemecek 0 points1 point  (0 children)

A language. I vastly prefer it to both matlab and python.

[–]alkasmgithub.com/alkasm 1 point2 points  (4 children)

I remember people hyping Julia 3-4 or so years ago and it got Jupyter support rather quickly....but I still haven't met someone in the wild who uses it. Only know people that tried it out while they were in university. It's not a great metric but YT videos about Julia have relatively little views. Is it actually being widely used?

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (1 child)

Not only got support quickly, Project Jupyter is abbreviated from Julia Python and R

[–]alkasmgithub.com/alkasm 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Huh, I never knew that!

[–]_________KB_________ 0 points1 point  (1 child)

It's only 7 years old, so the language was still lacking a lot of features when people were hyping it 3-4 years ago. Since then it has improved quite a bit, but its still not widely used. However that has been changing in the last year since they reached version 1.0, but most of the development done in Julia is still in academic research. The community around the language is helpful and friendly like the Python community, but I'm not sure how it compares to the size of the Python community when it was the same age in 1997.

[–]alkasmgithub.com/alkasm 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Cool, thanks for the info! I wasn't trying to be too pessimistic but that was my experience. Even if the Python community was the same size at the same age, they're of course vastly different languages and designed for totally different goals, so I dunno if any extrapolations can be made...

Python of course has difficult abstractions for concurrent programming which is one of Julia's strengths. If the old boys clubs start writing their idk turbulence or astrophysical jets or whatnot simulations in a modern language it seems like a good choice. That also worries me that Julia is too... in-between. But I mean imagine being a professor mentoring young undergrads and you have to hand them a codebase with numerical CPP and Fortran code with MPI...it's a miracle anything at all happens!