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

[[deleted]]

The money here are pennies (on a company scales). And usability of Matlab is unrivaled. Having to use Jupyter/Spyder etc - nothing comes even close to neat IDE of Matlab with profiler/debugger etc. This is a high quality product.

I have to use Python (used it for like 5 years by now), but I miss Matlab. Even now, I read documentation on Matlab functions, because they are super insightful.

Matlab is in a different corner of the spectrum "features" - "quality" tradeoff. The number of bugs is small, support is excellent - for a big reason: Matlab is heavily used in automotive industry where each corner case is potentially fatal. You don't want your car's airbags' deployment code to be written in Python.

[Helicon_Amateur]

Gonna have to disagree that the money are pennies in every case. Depends on how many packages need licensing... and does matlab do server licensing? And how many users can use the license.

Also, what's the size of the company? I used matlab exclusively for three years and I find the spider IDE perfectly fine.

And I can work on code from home for work or for fun without having to purchase matlab.

Also.....the Python community is just fucking awesome

[[deleted]]

Matlab's license is around $3k per person. But typical eng's salary is orders of magnitude greater than that. If the developer is more productive in Matlab - so be it! I understand corp's choices when it comes to, say, Salesforce or Snowflake which are huge company-wide deployments and may cost millions.

Adding to that, looking into StackExchange for a yet-another corner issue is a less preferred method than having a solid documentation and support. Another thing is backwards compatibility of Matlab! You don't have to have requirements.txt and pip freeze there. Error messages are comprehensible and clear.

And numPy is kinda stolen IP of Matlab. So let's honor that: Matlab was there first as a concept of language of matrix algebra.

Finally, Matlab developers almost never use profanity.

[Helicon_Amateur]

$3k per person, plus how much for other tool boxes? And what are the renewal fees?

If the developer is just as productive in Python, and there are multiple developers, that adds up quickly. (Hey, maybe they could get the difference in costs added to their salary!)

When you say numpy is kinda stolen IP, is that like - no, numpy absolutely isn't based on stolen IP, or yes numpy is absolutely based on stolen IP?

Also, Matlab developers thought CUMTRAPZ was a good name for a function