![]() ![]() ![]() Matlab is expensive, and the cost kicks in right away: there's no Community Edition or "open core" of Matlab, so if you're a business and you want to use Matlab at all, it costs several thousand dollars up front. Cost is a big barrier maybe the biggest.I've been building Matlab systems in the Finance for about 15 years here's what I've seen: There are very good reasons to make a switch, but price wasn't one of them, it's just the one I think stuck. But such considerations don't really matter in an academic environment, and so we are where we are. Having used BOTH professionally, the maintenance costs for matlab are much MUCH lower than for Python - if I'm assigning people from my FTE budget, I don't care that I'm getting the license for free if I spend an extra man month each year dealing with another f'n pandas update that breaks backwards compatability for no f'n reason. There are more practical reasons that have forced my hand, but the cost should not have been one of them. The thing that bothers me about this, is that it wasn't a good reason to move away from matlab. ![]() Once that generation of students moved through grad schools and became profs, the world shifted, and matlab has gradually developed dust and cobwebs in many departments. People don't like to pay for languages, and this was especially strong in universities. People view python as free, and, despite it being relatively cheap for educational institutions, I think this has built up into an almost moral crusade. I think the single biggest cause of the shift is the price allergy. When I went through my computer science degree, virtually ever class focused on algorithms used Matlab in fact - and my school was very well known for it's CS program (obviously many classes used C++ or C or Java as well, to be clear). The short answer is that many fields cited below (Machine learning being my favorite) WERE dominated by Matlab. You are going to see quite a bit of different opinions about this one. ![]()
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