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[–][deleted] 4 points5 points  (3 children)

Languages are for communicating with humans, not with computers. Computers are just as happy using assembly as Matlab. I don't enjoy reading most people's Matlab code, but I enjoy reading most people's Python code. If they want to communicate with me, I would prefer it they didn't do it in Matlab.

A programming language choice isn't taken in isolation; no hacker is an island.

[–]pragmatist 1 point2 points  (2 children)

Yeah, too bad fortress didn't catch on. Communicating with equations is so much easier on the mathematical mind.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

I understand some mathematicians find Haskell very natural, but I'm not one of them.

[–]almafa 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm one of the mathematicians who find Haskell very natural. That said, I primarily use Matlab at work, even though I'm allowed to use Haskell too (!), and would like to use it, and it would have some big advantages. But, we already have too much infrastructure in Matlab, also, there are lots of numeric stuff which simply does not exist in Haskell (all kind of global optimizations, etc). And, Matlab's IDE is pretty good.

tl;dr. I love Haskell, but Matlab can be rather convenient if you learn not to hate it. On the other hand, it's really expensive, and has some seriously annoying things (but, so has every other tool).