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Comment by fnordfnordfnord | Hacker News Reader

In addition to the advantages of Matlab mentioned by others, a lot of uni/college freshman level (and even upper level) STEM curricula include one or more courses involving Matlab. They've gotten themselves included in a few textbooks as well.

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That's awesome that Matlab is such a good expensive product. Personally I'm an open source guy all the way so I support R and Python (and Julia, I suppose) at every opportunity. Yeah, maybe there are some rough edges, but my thinking is that since they're good enough at this point, I can work around those rough edges...and I anticipate that hundreds of thousands of users will eventually drive them to being as good or better than any commercial offering. Take SAS, for instance, I don't like it--largely due to the fact that it's so expensive most companies don't upgrade until they absolutely have to. So you'll run into lots of employers running a very old version of SAS (like 9.2), without any of the extensions which help you solve problems and be more productive. So when I started my new data science-ish job at my current employer and had the option of which tools to use for machine learning and modeling I chose R and Python. But to each their own. I just dislike contributing to the market share of software I could never afford to run on my personal computer.

I'm in agreement with most of the things you said, and I wasn't really meaning to advocate for Matlab; but rather just to point out another reason why someone might choose it. I used it in college, and at one company I worked at. It was much nicer to work with than LabView. I appreciated the hand-holding I got from Matlab, but eventually became competent enough to do my job in several languages, mainly Python.

>I just dislike contributing to the market share of software I could never afford to run on my personal computer.

I agree and that's one reason I tend toward OSS in courses I teach now, unless there is no practical alternative.

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