Oh god I hope this is not a close source language. I have spent 10+ years fighting the MATLAB ecosystem, I prefer not to spend the next 10 years fighting this thing.
Matlab existed for a reason, and has since become irrelevant, in particular in the face of python being used as a more flexible open source scientific computing scripting language.
If this is closed source, it's already as irrelevant as matlab so no reason to fight it. If there are useful bits there will be python versions of them.
> Matlab existed for a reason, and has since become irrelevant
My man I wish this was true. I am not exaggerating the 10+ year thing, there are very important industries being run today on MATLAB. You remember the moment when you learned that a lot of wall street runs on excel? This is the moment you learn a lot of silicon manufacturing runs on MATLAB. An obscene amount.
Silicon manufacturing, aerospace, automotive, robotics, the list goes on. It’s a well-entrenched ecosystem that makes a decent chunk of cash and has a lot of staying power. Simulink seems like a major factor in this staying power.
Strongly disagree with this statement (and agree with the parent). In many hard engineering disciplines, appropriate solvers (e.g. SuiteSparse) are barely supported, if at all (e.g. scikit-sparse only supports CHOLMOD, and UMFPACK is supported via another package).
People overestimate how many people are willing to work on the "wrap C numerical library in Python" problem. On the other hand, Mathworks employs many people to work on things like mldivide. At least in the SuiteSparse case, the first class citizen is MATLAB.
Sounds like a niche to me, with lots of options (wrapping C numerical libraries in python) for people that don't want to be locked in.
When I was in school 15 years ago, matlab was pretty ubiquitous.
Maybe it was to strong to say it's irrelevant as opposed to niche, though it's definitely irrelevant in many fields where it used to be king. I do miss the figures though, I liked the combination of programmatic formatting + manual tweaks.
What exactly do you call a niche? Entire industries are being propped up using it. What happens is because the solvers are written in these things, engineers start building everything with matlab. I have personally made networking implementations, webservers, Apache Arrow clone etc. It's really not as niche as you think it is. For mostly worse, this language is everywhere.
Matlab is a lot faster than Python. At least an order of magnitude, once you move out of calls to LAPACK et al. It has been improved quite a bit on that front.
So Python is often not a realistic alternative. This is where initiatives like Mojo come in. They will be at least an order of magnitude faster than Matlab again.
But if you want to get people to move from Matlab to a powerful Open-Source alternative: Julia has a syntax that is much closer to Matlab than Python's. I had good success to get colleagues to use Julia which wouldn't look at Python, because the syntax was too far out of their comfort zone.
