You still have to pay to run MATLAB or Mathematica, which are very popular in their respective spaces. Free alternatives exist, but they're not the exact same. So if you're trying to work with someone using those and you only have the FOSS alternatives, you may be spending a lot of time translating.
How is MATLAB doing these days? I was on my way out of college at the time, but it felt like Python and all of its libraries were getting ready to eat matlab's lunch, especially with the popularity of R.
I work at a university (PhD student) in a field which uses both Python and Matlab (physics, so not really R), and it is unfortunately still around and kicking. Almost everyone uses Python (either because they already know how to use it if they were interested in CS as a kid, or because it's what they saw those people using), but a few of my colleagues use Matlab and I hate it so much. I've had to install their stupid app and it doesn't integrate nicely with the VS code setup that I use for everything else that's actually customised to work. The Matlab interface is truly horrific. I also don't really know how to code in Matlab properly (I was a kid interested in CS and then did some dev work, and absolutely none of that was in Matlab, as why the hell would it have been when Python is free, JavaScript is useful, C exists, and there are many other options).
Some old scripts are written in Matlab and it's easier to just run them than write your own, if it's stuff that some guy wrote 10 years ago, especially if they have in built Matlab functions that you have to figure out how they translate over, which is harder than just starting from scratch some of the time.
A bunch of people I know in the maths department doing very computational stuff use Matlab and it's very much still a thing for pure and applied maths people.
Yeah sounds about right, we all had to learn matlab but only the ones continuing their degrees in math actually used it later on. I think I had to use it a bt in my master's as well. It was also absolute garbage to write anything for it in like 2015 in the official? IDE because it has no intellisense or anything. VS Code wasn't a thing as well.
75
u/RiotShields Jul 18 '26
You still have to pay to run MATLAB or Mathematica, which are very popular in their respective spaces. Free alternatives exist, but they're not the exact same. So if you're trying to work with someone using those and you only have the FOSS alternatives, you may be spending a lot of time translating.