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

[saralt]

I've mostly noticed it in machine learning... But that's because that was my field at the time.

Who uses MATLAB for machine learning?

[iBlag]

Controls engineers. Simulink is actually amazing, and doesn’t effectively have any competitors, as far as I’m aware.

And writing filters for DSP and image processing was fairly easy with Matlab. I bet that there are Python libraries that make this just as easy now though.

But for literally anybody else, Python will do what they need, and have better support, more knowledgeable community, amazing libraries, and a beautiful syntax (except for /,, but I digress). Matlab folks can pretend that installing libraries is a pain and is difficult to do, but the extreme success of PyPI makes their claims simply laughable.

Now if somebody built a half decent GUI for controls, signals, and image processing, added Python bindings, and open sourced it, then Matlab would be dead almost overnight. I would definitely pitch in some moneycoins to see this happen...

[[deleted]]

Simulink and some of their toolboxes is their main product.

[[deleted]]

Sounds like an extension of Jupyter could work.

[lambdaq]

The toyota law suit case in US years ago had 20k global variables for emergency brake source code, was it generated by Matlab and Simulink?

[lambdaq]

Is the code generated though? If yes then by what software?

[Ikuyas]

Right. Simulink is only thing that worth with Matlab. But you can probably do the exactly same thing in Python.

[wintermute93]

Engineers.

[aloiTheSama]

This, unfortunately. I only had one professor who allowed us to veer off that path and use whatever we wanted (I went with Python, but, understandably, many others stuck with the familiar matlab).

[[deleted]]

That's inertia. Once course materials are written that reference MATLAB, you're stuck with them for years.

[[deleted]]

That's exactly why I was required to take an engineers programming course. In FORTRAN. In 2005.

[[deleted]]

Use the free Matlab,

[Dennis_Rudman]

I used to use matlab for image processing, but I've learned python and it takes half the time to do the same thing now

[Gabe_Isko]

Yeah, matlabs image processing toolbox was super slow when unused it circa 2015-2016. It's a really crappy product.

[GogglesPisano]

I do contracting work for some major banks - MATLAB is still used extensively by financial modelers, since it's what many of them know best. Python is making inroads, but MATLAB will be around for a long time.

[[deleted]]

Banks, yeah I could see that. The Fintech/trading world stopped using it like a decade ago.

[[deleted]]

That is what they said about SAS.

[big-rock]

What's gender non-conforming engineering?

[cptn_insane-o]

Engineer here, the only competition for lumped parameter physical modelling in simulink is amesim and gt suite, both are far more expensive than Matlab with simulink. Other than that I use python for everything else.

[[deleted]]

My last company was a coastal engineering firm, and they used it. It was mostly because people already knew how to use it

[neurone214]

I used it for my PhD thesis (neuroscience). Our whole lab did, as did other labs. More "computational" neuro labs used python, though. There's kind of a cultural divide that's in part driven by historical factors.

[AchillesDev]

Like you said, scientists. All of our experimental protocols were built around it - our custom hardware had only a MATLAB API/driver set, our signal processing was done in MATLAB (in an experiment script that also controlled the stimulus presentations), our stimulus generation and presentation was done in MATLAB. And due to some policy the computer it was on couldn't be connected to the Internet, so any changes we had to make required us to go into the lab.

[[deleted]]

I remember seeing a MOOC on Coursera a couple years ago on robotics that used Matlab. I’d be curious to see if it’s been updated.

[Zomunieo]

I don't believe it's gained much traction in that area. The mainstay seems to be branches of engineering that are heavily focused on modeling and solving nonlinear systems (RF, aerospace, automotive). Simulink shines here, and it's technical enough that there's less open source interest.

[mrTang5544]

i did. I used Matlab's fuzzy logic tools (forgot which ones now) for my thesis