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Comment by galangalalgol | Hacker News Reader

I find that really surprising, would you elaborate? I love julia but I haven't found a repl or pluto based workflow that I am anywhere near as productive in for prototyping algorithms as I am in Matlab. And it typically doesn't even run that much slower.

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typo, sorry. that Matlab was supposed to be Mathematica. IMO Julia is also better than Matlab here (I use editor+repl, but Pluto is also pretty good), but Matlab is definitely a contender in this area.

Editor from within the repl or outside? If outside, what triggers the repl to reload files? If inside, which editor? I never found a good way to copy and paste a line I got right and liked into a file. I tried drdocstrings but it never seemed to feel smooth bit doesn't help all the keys in julia default to being emacslike and ally muscle memory is vimish. So even after making my repl editor vim, there is stuff in the repl that feels foreign.

editor outside the repl. Revise means that you get auto-reload on save.

Thanks! I thought revise only worked if I used the internal editor.

Why would you use Matlab to "prototype algorithms"? Maybe we have different notions what that means but Matlab is certainly not aimed at that. It's aimed at engineers who want to evaluate their data or design/control embedded devices, and who are experts at their field of engineering while having very little computer science, numerics or programming background.

I work in embedded DSP and controls, and even with a very strong programming background, I find Matlab to be a lot faster to verify my approach for something is going to work than julia or numpy. Not because of all the toolboxes, which I mostly don't use, but because the work flow makes it easier to try stuff fast and visualize it in meaningful ways more easily.

I know no one who uses Matlab for the uses you mention. Basically everyone is using it for algorithm development, that includes both students and companies. And the way I understand it, algorithm development/prototyping also its core application.

Not that I like doing this in Matlab, but that's what everyone uses, though some are moving to python.

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