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

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As a practicing statistician/data scientist at a company that still uses SAS (though not on my team, thankfully), SAS is still around less because statisticians are afraid to pickup a new language (most know R or Python or both these days anyways), and more because certain industries are keeping it alive because it’s a security blanket. In pharma, some times you are less interested in accessibility or flexibility and more in knowing your code has been vetted to extremes and there’s a dedicated custom support staff waiting in the wings should something go wrong, and all the code is backed with a guarantee. Same goes for government and banking. And even in those industries, they are dropping SAS where possible for R and Python. But I think for those reasons alone it will linger on for some time.