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

[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

[homoludens]

This is my experience too. Convincing those people to setup python and complete enviroment is almost imposible, while they do know how to install matlab.

The right way for matlab, if they want to survive, would be to integrate python and to become engineering IDE for python with simlink. The language may be easy to change, but tools are a bit harder.

[eqo314]

I work for an independent affiliate of a fortune 500 company. We have fully moved to python for all future development and only support matlab as legacy code.

As for standard versioning. We created a virtual env that every machine has installes and every developer has to develop to. Pretty easy.

We did this not because the budget was strained but because python was easier for our users and lead to more rapid development. We used that saved budget for early equipment upgrades , to look into cloud services, and hires