And I for example don’t like using matlab - it’s not free (as in freedom), it’s very bulky, GUI is slow and heavy, there’s no way to use it as a console app in linux afaik.
You absolutely can. Many of the Matlab users I know never touch the GUI/IDE. They'll just code in Emacs and run their code from the terminal.
The original generation of MATLAB creators and developers like Cleve tended to come from an academic UNIX/mainframe/HPC type background, and so they were big CL users and lived in vim/emacs. And that carried over to a lot of the programmers working at The MathWorks to this day. For a lot of engineers I worked with who hack on the “guts” of the products (the language parser/interpreter/JIT, math internals, computational geometry and stats libraries, etc), the only time they’d fire up the IDE was at the pre-release bug bash every six months lol!
In my original post, saying the “majority” of TMW ran this way is probably an exaggeration, but a “sizeable minority” would be true. Maybe Ned could run an internal poll and include those results in the blog post :)
* https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/profile/authors/1409...