Comment by jkarr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jkarr | Hacker News Reader

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Agreed. MATLAB its set of downsides. On the plus side development is rapid and since 2008 it has good support for classes. We're starting to move toward python for future work.

I think MATLAB itself isn't so bad, so much as the way its typically used -- poorly commented, organized, and untested. We put a lot of effort into clearly commenting and organizing the code. We used matlab-xunit and hudson to manage testing, which worked quite well. http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/22846-ma..., http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/33971-xm....

  > We're starting to move toward python for future work.

Thanks a lot for commenting. As somebody who does a lot of scientific coding in Python and part-time contributor to a couple of projects, I'm of course curious -- what's your reasoning behind the move and where do you anticipate to see the most friction?

A variety of reasons really. In no particular order: - Still has good math support, rapid development - Better OOP support - More libraries -- everything from web development to scientific computing to GUIs to databasing - More reliable, less buggy - Better development tools -- code completion, testing, coverage, profiling, etc - Free. Therefore can more easily be run on clusters without licensing issues or using the MATLAB MCR

I don't see any friction, except if one needed to port old code. It seems that a lot of people are moving toward SciPy/NumPy these days.

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