I would be incredibly happy if we were taught in Python or anything other than the hideous monster that is Matlab on my MSc course. After using Ruby and Python it's rather painful to use such a clunky environment.
The other advantage of matlab is that it is more friendly to non-programmers. There are a lot of people that get lots of real things done in matlab due to all the semi-idiotic design features that annoy serious programmers. (Monolithic namespace, "everything is a matrix", one function per file, etc.) The huge advantage of "copy on write" is that you don't even have to really understand the concept of "different copies of the same data". That's a big hurdle coming to python-- a hurdle you might not want to get over if you don't care about programming, and just want to solve your problem.
It's like Python is a better programming environment than Excel too, but spreadsheets aren't going away anytime soon (it remains to be seen whether Python + OOo wins over the long term)
Mathworks could do a lot worse than bolt on an optional Python front-end. What people pay for Matlab for is the toolboxes, really.
Actually if anyone has any suggestions to address those issues, I'd appreciate it.
Matlab works very well for many disciplines and the shear amount of documentation make it very easy to use for people who aren't really programmers. My main peeve with matlab is that to write a function it is required to make a separate file however most problems that are solved with matlab don't really need functions in the first place.
SciPy/NumPy and matplotlib can be nice to use but if I need to get an engineering problem done quickly I can find functions that I need much quicker in matlab and the matrix as the central object is very helpful.
The problem of having many possible combinations as mentioned by lliiffee doesn't seem like much of a big deal. Surely a faculty could just specify their recommended setup?
> My main peeve with matlab is that to write a function it
> is required to make a separate file however most problems
> that are solved with matlab don't really need functions
> in the first place.
x = 10:-1:1;
a = sort(x)(1:5); % illegal!
tmp = sort(x); % depressing :(
a = tmp(1:5);
f = @(x,i)x(i); % a little better
a = f(sort(x),1:5);
function rtn = foo(x)
rtn = bar(x) + 1
function rtn = bar(x)
rtn = x^2
My comment exactly. Having worked with Matlab professionally, how it survives when there's any plausible alternative is astounding. Well, not really, Matlab is pathological as a development environment but somehow does a good job of facilitating the back-of-an-envelop-magic of the physicists.
It's the crystal meth of numeric programming - a quick rush followed by a giant crash.