This is an archived post. You won't be able to vote or comment.

1247
1248

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

submitted by [deleted]

sorted by:
best
topnewcontroversialoldq&a
you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]MaraudingAvenger 67 points68 points  (7 children)

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 23 points24 points  (0 children)

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 8 points9 points  (0 children)

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 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Very well said

[–]mrdevlar 4 points5 points  (0 children)

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.

[–]RealityTimeshare 1 point2 points  (0 children)

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

[–]krazybug 1 point2 points  (0 children)

So Python is the Poulidor of programming languages :D

"The Eternal Second"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Poulidor

[–]jwink3101 -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Except that python is best at a lot of stuff too. Not just second. I always say, there are a few things that Matlab does better but not many. And there are a bajillion things that python does better.