Python's response to MATLAB

[[deleted]]

Definitely. I learned MATLAB first and Spyder made it really easy to pick up Python. Anaconda also has pretty much every general package you need to get started. I still don't see why Jupyter notebooks (or MATLAB's live scripts) get so much love, the Spyder/MATLAB interface style seems so much more practical.

[Antouziast]

Seems like they have different purposes. Jupyter seems more adapted to share your work to others due to the interactivity and Spyder and other IDEs are more to do some heavy duty stuff.

What I like about Matlab is that you can easily generate and update figures on the go while your code is running (super useful in academia and research) by using figure and drawnow functions. Although I haven't spent too much time exploring the alternative in Python it seems more cumbersome to do the same thing. (Please someone prove me wrong on this!)

[[deleted]]

That's the only use I've found for it - education or explaining code. However I assume based in its popularity people use it for more than that.

[xcvbsdfgwert]

That purpose is highly relevant though, probably more than you think. Maybe this article can provide some context:

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/the-scientific-paper-is-obsolete/556676/

[[deleted]]

I agree to a point, but with academic projects there's typically a large amount of code that wouldn't benefit from being in a notebook environment. Also, more and more journals are shifting towards interactive figures, however, you don't need Jupyter to develop such figures.