Matlab is an great tool, if you can afford it.

It was a very unpleasant feeling when I graduated from my PhD and realized that most, if not all, of the Matlab scripts I had used for my research would now be useless to me unless I joined a company or national laboratory that paid for licenses with the specific toolboxes I had used.

I'm glad that a significant portion of tools in my current field are in open source languages such as Python and Julia. It widens access to other researchers who can then build upon it.

(And yes, I'm aware of Octave. It does not have the capabilities of Matlab in the areas that I worked in, and was not able to run all of my PhD scripts. I have not tried RunMat yet, but am looking forward to experimenting with it.)

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drnick1 a day ago | parent | next [-]

> I graduated from my PhD and realized that most, if not all, of the Matlab scripts I had used for my research would now be useless

And this is why you should write free software and, as a scientist, develop algorithms that do not rely on the facilities of a specific language or platform. Nothing is more annoying than reading a scientific paper and finding out that 90% of the "implementation" is calling a third party library treated as a blackbox.

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bsder a day ago | parent | prev [-]

> And yes, I'm aware of Octave. It does not have the capabilities of Matlab in the areas that I worked in

Was there a specific reason for that? Or was it simply nobody wrote the code?

	▲	ubj a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Octave has not implemented all of Matlab's functionality. You can see a list of Matlab functions that have not yet been implemented in Octave at the link below. It's a long list. https://hg.savannah.gnu.org/hgweb/octave/file/tip/scripts/he... EDIT: If the original link above isn't working, here's a fairly recent archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20250123192851/https://hg.savann...
	▲	kelipso a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		You could say that no one wrote that code. But Matlab has serious packages in numerous engineering fields and it’s not anywhere close to easily replicable. It’s like how open source will never replace Excel but probably worse because it’s multiple fields and it’s way harder to replicate it.