What is MATLAB good for Why is it so used by universities When is it better than Python

Question

I ve been recently asked to learn some MATLAB basics for a class   What does make it so cool for researchers and people that works in university  I saw it s cool to work with matrices and plotting things     things that can be done easily in Python using some libraries    Writing a function or parsing a file is just painful  I m still at the start  what am I missing   In the  real  world  what should I think to use it for  When should it can do better than Python  For better I mean  easy way to write something performing     UPDATE 1  One of the things I d like to know the most is  Am I missing something    D  UPDATE 2  Thank you for your answers  My question is not about buy or not to buy MATLAB  The university has the possibility to give me a copy of an old version of MATLAB  MATLAB 5 I guess  for free  without breaking the license  I m interested in its capabilities and if it deserves a deeper study  I won t need anything more than basic MATLAB in oder to pass the exam  P   it will really be better than Python for a specific kind of task in the real world

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Personally  I tend to think of Matlab as an interactive matrix calculator and plotting tool with a few scripting capabilities  rather than as a full-fledged programming language like Python or C   The reason for its success is that matrix stuff and plotting work out of the box  and you can do a few very specific things in it with virtually no actual programming knowledge   The language is  as you point out  extremely frustrating to use for more general-purpose tasks  such as even the simplest string processing   Its syntax is quirky  and it wasn t created with the abstractions necessary for projects of more than 100 lines or so in mind   I think the reason why people try to use Matlab as a serious programming language is that most engineers  there are exceptions  my degree is in biomedical engineering and I like programming  are horrible programmers and hate to program   They re taught Matlab in college mostly for the matrix math  and they learn some rudimentary programming as part of learning Matlab  and just assume that Matlab is good enough   I can t think of anyone I know who knows any language besides Matlab  but still uses Matlab for anything other than a few pure number crunching applications

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Most of answers do not get the point   There is ONE reason matlab is so good and so widely used   EXTREMELY FAST CODING  I am a computer vision phD student and have been using matlab for 4 years  before my phD I was using different languages including C    java  php  python    Most of the computer vision researchers are using exclusively matlab   1  Researchers need fast prototyping  In research environment  we have  hopefully  often new ideas  and we want to test them really quick to see if it s worth keeping on in that direction  And most often only a tiny sub-part of what we code will be useful   Matlab is often slower at execution time  but we don t care much  Because we don t know in advance what method is going to be successful  we have to try many things  so our bottle neck is programming time  because our code will most often run a few times to get the results to publish  and that s all   So let s see how matlab can help   2  Everything I need is already there  Matlab has really a lot of functions that I need  so that I don t have to reinvent them all the time   change the index of a matrix to 2d coordinate  ind2sub extract all patches of an image  im2col  compute a histogram of an image  hist Im      find the unique elements in a list unique list   add a vector to all vectors of a matrix bsxfun  plus M V   convolution on n-dimensional arrays convn A   calculate the computation time of a sub part of the code  tic    code  toc  graphical interface to crop an image  imcrop im    The list could be very long    And they are very easy to find by using the help   The closest to that is python   But It s just a pain in python  I have to go to google each time to look for the name of the function I need  and then I need to add packages  and the packages are not compatible one with another  the format of the matrix change  the convolution function only handle doubles but does not make an error when I give it char  just give a wrong output    no  3  IDE  An example  I launch a script  It produces an error because of a matrix  I can still execute code with the command line  I visualize it doing  imagesc matrix   I see that the last line of the matrix is weird  I fix the bug  All variables are still set  I select the remaining of the code  press F9 to execute the selection  and everything goes on  Debuging becomes fast  thanks to that   Matlab underlines some of my errors before execution  So I can quickly see the problems  It proposes some way to make my code faster   There is an awesome profiler included in the IDE  KCahcegrind is such a pain to use compared to that   python s IDEs are awefull  python without ipython is not usable  I never manage to debug  using ipython    autocompletion  help for function arguments      4  Concise code  To normalize all the columns of a matrix   which I need all the time   I do  bsxfun  times A 1  sqrt sum A  2     To remove from a matrix all colums with small sum   A   sum A  lt e      To do the computation on the GPU   gpuX   gpuarray X        code normally and everything is done on GPU   To paralize my code   parfor n 1 100     code normally and everything is multi-threaded   What language can beat that   And of course  I rarely need to make loops  everything is included in functions  which make the code way easier to read  and no headache with indices  So I can focus  on what I want to program  not how to program it   5  Plotting tools  Matlab is famous for its plotting tools  They are very helpful   Python s plotting tools have much less features  But there is one thing super annoying  You can plot figures only once per script    if I have along script I cannot display stuffs at each step ---  useless   6  Documentation  Everything is very quick to access  everything is crystal clear  function names are well chosen  With python  I always need to google stuff  look in forums or stackoverflow     complete time hog   PS  Finally  what I hate with matlab  its price

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Hold everything  When s the last time you programed your calculator to play tetris  Did you actually think you could write anything you want in those 128k of RAM  Likely not  MATLAB is not for programming unless you re dealing with huge matrices  It s the graphing calculator you whip out when you ve got Megabytes to Gigabytes of data to crunch and or plot  Learn just basic stuff  but also don t kill yourself trying to make Python be a graphing calculator   You ll quickly get a feel for when you want to crunch  plot or explore in MATLAB and when you want to have all that Python offers  Lots of engineers turn to pre and post processing in Python or Perl  Occasionally even just calling out to MATLAB for the hard bits   They are such completely different tools that you should learn their basic strengths first without trying to replace one with the other  Granted for saving money I d either use Octave or skimp on ease and learn to work with sparse matrices in Perl or Python

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Seems to be pure inertia   Where it is in use  everyone is too busy to learn IDL or numpy in sufficient detail to switch  and don t want to rewrite good working programs   Luckily that s not strictly true  but true enough in enough places that Matlab will be around a long time    Like Fortran  in active use where i work

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Hold everything  When s the last time you programed your calculator to play tetris  Did you actually think you could write anything you want in those 128k of RAM  Likely not  MATLAB is not for programming unless you re dealing with huge matrices  It s the graphing calculator you whip out when you ve got Megabytes to Gigabytes of data to crunch and or plot  Learn just basic stuff  but also don t kill yourself trying to make Python be a graphing calculator   You ll quickly get a feel for when you want to crunch  plot or explore in MATLAB and when you want to have all that Python offers  Lots of engineers turn to pre and post processing in Python or Perl  Occasionally even just calling out to MATLAB for the hard bits   They are such completely different tools that you should learn their basic strengths first without trying to replace one with the other  Granted for saving money I d either use Octave or skimp on ease and learn to work with sparse matrices in Perl or Python

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I know this question is old  and therefore may no longer be watched  but I felt it was necessary to comment  As an aerospace engineer at Georgia Tech  I can say  with no qualms  that MATLAB is awesome  You can have it quickly interface with your Excel spreadsheets to pull in data about how high and fast rockets are flying  how the wind affects those same rockets  and how different engines matter  Beyond rocketry  similar concepts come into play for cars  trucks  aircraft  spacecraft  and even athletics  You can pull in large amounts of data  manipulate all of it  and make sure your results are as they should be  In the event something is off  you can add a line break where an error occurs to debug your program without having to recompile every time you want to run your program  Is it slower than some other programs  Well  technically  I m sure if you want to do the number crunching it s great for on an NVIDIA graphics processor  it would probably be faster  but it requires a lot more effort with harder debugging   As a general programming language  MATLAB is weak  It s not meant to work against Python  Java  ActionScript  C C   or any other general purpose language  It s meant for the engineering and mathematics niche the name implies  and it does so fantastically

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MATLAB  as mentioned by others  is great at matrix manipulation  and was originally built as an extension of the well-known BLAS and LAPACK libraries used for linear algebra   It interfaces well with other languages like Java  and is well favored by engineering and scientific companies for its well developed and documented libraries   From what I know of Python and NumPy  while they share many of the fundamental capabilities of MATLAB  they don t have the full breadth and depth of capabilities with their libraries   Personally  I use MATLAB because that s what I learned in my internship  that s what I used in grad school  and that s what I used in my first job   I don t have anything against Python  or any other language    It s just what I m used too   Also  there is another free version in addition to scilab mentioned by  Jim C from gnu called Octave

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The main reason it is useful in industry is the plug-ins built on top of the core functionality  Almost all active Matlab development for the last few years has focused on these     Unfortunately  you won t have much opportunity to use these in an academic environment

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MATLAB is a popular and widely adapted piece of a sophisticated software package  It d be a mistake to think it s merely a math software since it has a wide range of  toolboxes   I recently used Matplotlib to plot some data from a database and it did the job without needing all the bells and whistles of MATLAB  However  it may not be proper to compare Python and MATLAB in every situation  As with everything else the decision depends on what you need to do   I used MATLAB in undergrad for control systems design and simulation and also for image processing in grad school  For these fields MATLAB makes the most sense because of the powerful control and image processing toolboxes  As everyone mentioned  array operations  which are used in every MATLAB script you d need to write  are very easy with MATLAB   Another nice thing about MATLAB is that it s very easy and fast to do prototyping and trying out ideas using the built in toolbox functions  For instance  it takes no effort to import an image and compute it s histogram or do some simple processing on it  One disadvantage of MATLAB could be it s speed because of its interpreted nature  However  if one really needs speed than he can choose to implement the tested logic in C C    etc   For further comparison with Python  I can say that MATLAB provides a full package for you to do your work without the need of looking around for external libraries and implementing extra functions   One last point about MATLAB which I see is not mentioned in the answers here is that it has a very powerful visual modeling simulation environment called Simulink  It s easier to design and simulate larger systems with Simulink   Finally  again  it all depends on the problem you need to solve  If your problem domain can make use of one of MATLAB s toolboxes and you have access to MATLAB then you can be sure that you ll have the right tool to solve it

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MATLAB is great for doing array manipulation  doing specialized math functions  and for creating nice plots quick   I d probably only use it for large programs if I could use a lot of array matrix manipulation   You don t have to worry about the IDE as much as in more formal packages  so it s easier for students without a lot of programming experience to pick up

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The main reason it is useful in industry is the plug-ins built on top of the core functionality  Almost all active Matlab development for the last few years has focused on these     Unfortunately  you won t have much opportunity to use these in an academic environment

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One reason MATLAB is popular with universities is the same reason a lot of things are popular with universities  there s a lot of professors familiar with it  and it s fairly robust   I ve spoken to a lot of folks who are especially interested in MATLAB s nascent ability to tap into the GPU instead of working serially   Having used Python in grad school  I kind of wish I had the licks to work with MATLAB in that case   It sure would make vector space calculations a breeze

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One reason MATLAB is popular with universities is the same reason a lot of things are popular with universities  there s a lot of professors familiar with it  and it s fairly robust   I ve spoken to a lot of folks who are especially interested in MATLAB s nascent ability to tap into the GPU instead of working serially   Having used Python in grad school  I kind of wish I had the licks to work with MATLAB in that case   It sure would make vector space calculations a breeze

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Adam is only partially right    Many  if not most  mathematicians will never touch it   If there is a computer tool used at all  it s going to be something like Mathematica or Maple   Engineering departments  on the other hand  often rely on it and there are definitely useful things for some applied mathematicians   It s also used heavily in industry in some areas   Something you have to realize about MATLAB is that it started off as a wrapper on Fortran libraries for linear algebra  For a long time  it had an attitude that  all the world is an array of doubles  floats     As a language  it has grown very organically  and there are some flaws that are very much baked in  if you look at it just as a programming language   However  if you look at it as an environment for doing certain types of research in  it has some real strengths  It s about as good as it gets for doing floating point linear algebra   The notation is simple and powerful  the implementation fast and trusted   It is very good at generating plots and other interactive tasks   There are a large number of  toolboxes  with good code for particular tasks  that are affordable   There is a large community of users that share numerical codes  Python   NumPy has nothing in the same league  at least yet   Python  warts and all  is a much better programming language  as are many others    However  it s a decade or so behind in terms of the tools   The key point is that the majority of people who use MATLAB are not programmers really  and don t want to be    It s a lousy choice for a general programming language  it s quirky  slow for many tasks  you need to vectorize things to get efficient codes   and not easy to integrate with the outside world   On the other hand  for the things it is good at  it is very very good   Very few things compare   There s a company with reasonable support and who knows how many man-years put into it   This can matter in industry   Strictly looking at your Python vs  MATLAB comparison  they are mostly different tools for different jobs   In the areas where they do overlap a bit  it s hard to say what the better route to go is  depends a lot on what you re trying to do    But mostly Python isn t all that good at MATLAB s core strengths  and vice versa

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Matlab is good at doing number crunching  Also Matrix and matrix manipulation  It has many helpful built in libraries depends on the what version  I think it is easier to use than python if you are going to be calculating equations

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The most likely reason that it s used so much in universities is that the mathematics faculty are used to it  understand it  and know how to incorporate it into their curriculum

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I believe you have a very good point and it s one that has been raised in the company where I work  The company is limited in it s ability to apply matlab because of the licensing costs involved  One developer proved that Python was a very suitable replacement but it fell on ignorant ears because to the owners of those ears      No-one in the company knew Python although many of us wanted to use it   MatLab has a name  a company  and task force behind it to solve any problems  There were some  but not a lot  of legacy MatLab projects that would need to be re-written    If it s worth   10 000      it s gotta be worth it     I m with you here  Python is a very good replacement for MatLab   I should point out that I ve been told the company uses maybe 5  to 10  of MatLabs capabilities and that is the basis for my agreement with the original poster

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MATLAB  as mentioned by others  is great at matrix manipulation  and was originally built as an extension of the well-known BLAS and LAPACK libraries used for linear algebra   It interfaces well with other languages like Java  and is well favored by engineering and scientific companies for its well developed and documented libraries   From what I know of Python and NumPy  while they share many of the fundamental capabilities of MATLAB  they don t have the full breadth and depth of capabilities with their libraries   Personally  I use MATLAB because that s what I learned in my internship  that s what I used in grad school  and that s what I used in my first job   I don t have anything against Python  or any other language    It s just what I m used too   Also  there is another free version in addition to scilab mentioned by  Jim C from gnu called Octave

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Most of answers do not get the point   There is ONE reason matlab is so good and so widely used   EXTREMELY FAST CODING  I am a computer vision phD student and have been using matlab for 4 years  before my phD I was using different languages including C    java  php  python    Most of the computer vision researchers are using exclusively matlab   1  Researchers need fast prototyping  In research environment  we have  hopefully  often new ideas  and we want to test them really quick to see if it s worth keeping on in that direction  And most often only a tiny sub-part of what we code will be useful   Matlab is often slower at execution time  but we don t care much  Because we don t know in advance what method is going to be successful  we have to try many things  so our bottle neck is programming time  because our code will most often run a few times to get the results to publish  and that s all   So let s see how matlab can help   2  Everything I need is already there  Matlab has really a lot of functions that I need  so that I don t have to reinvent them all the time   change the index of a matrix to 2d coordinate  ind2sub extract all patches of an image  im2col  compute a histogram of an image  hist Im      find the unique elements in a list unique list   add a vector to all vectors of a matrix bsxfun  plus M V   convolution on n-dimensional arrays convn A   calculate the computation time of a sub part of the code  tic    code  toc  graphical interface to crop an image  imcrop im    The list could be very long    And they are very easy to find by using the help   The closest to that is python   But It s just a pain in python  I have to go to google each time to look for the name of the function I need  and then I need to add packages  and the packages are not compatible one with another  the format of the matrix change  the convolution function only handle doubles but does not make an error when I give it char  just give a wrong output    no  3  IDE  An example  I launch a script  It produces an error because of a matrix  I can still execute code with the command line  I visualize it doing  imagesc matrix   I see that the last line of the matrix is weird  I fix the bug  All variables are still set  I select the remaining of the code  press F9 to execute the selection  and everything goes on  Debuging becomes fast  thanks to that   Matlab underlines some of my errors before execution  So I can quickly see the problems  It proposes some way to make my code faster   There is an awesome profiler included in the IDE  KCahcegrind is such a pain to use compared to that   python s IDEs are awefull  python without ipython is not usable  I never manage to debug  using ipython    autocompletion  help for function arguments      4  Concise code  To normalize all the columns of a matrix   which I need all the time   I do  bsxfun  times A 1  sqrt sum A  2     To remove from a matrix all colums with small sum   A   sum A  lt e      To do the computation on the GPU   gpuX   gpuarray X        code normally and everything is done on GPU   To paralize my code   parfor n 1 100     code normally and everything is multi-threaded   What language can beat that   And of course  I rarely need to make loops  everything is included in functions  which make the code way easier to read  and no headache with indices  So I can focus  on what I want to program  not how to program it   5  Plotting tools  Matlab is famous for its plotting tools  They are very helpful   Python s plotting tools have much less features  But there is one thing super annoying  You can plot figures only once per script    if I have along script I cannot display stuffs at each step ---  useless   6  Documentation  Everything is very quick to access  everything is crystal clear  function names are well chosen  With python  I always need to google stuff  look in forums or stackoverflow     complete time hog   PS  Finally  what I hate with matlab  its price

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I think you answered your own question when you noted that Matlab is  cool to work with matrixes and plotting things   Any application that requires a lot of matrix maths and visualisation will probably be easiest to do in Matlab   That said  Matlab s syntax feels awkward and shows the language s age  In contrast  Python is a much nicer general purpose programming language and  with the right libraries can do much of what Matlab does  However  Matlab is always going to have a more concise syntax than Python for vector and matrix manipulation    If much of your programming involves these sorts of manipulations  such as in signal processing and some statistical techniques  then Matlab will be a better choice

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MATLAB WAS a wrapper around commonly available libraries  And in many cases it still is   When you get to larger datasets  it has many additional optimizations  including examining and special casing common problems  reducing to sparse matrices where useful  for example   and handling edge cases   Often  you can submit a problem in a standard form to a general function  and it will determine the best underlying algorithm to use based on your data   For small N  all algorithms are fast  but MATLAB makes determining the optimal algorithm a non-issue   This is written by someone who hates MATLAB  and has tried to replace it due to integration issues   From your question  you mention getting MATLAB 5 and using it for a course   At that level  you might want to look at Octave  an open source implementation with the same syntax   I m guessing it is up to MATLAB 5 levels by now  I only play around with it    That should allow you to  pass your exam    For bare MATLAB functionality it seems to be close   It is lacking in the toolbox support  which  again  mostly serves to reformulate the function calls to forms familiar to engineers in the field and selects the right underlying algorithm to use

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I know this question is old  and therefore may no longer be watched  but I felt it was necessary to comment  As an aerospace engineer at Georgia Tech  I can say  with no qualms  that MATLAB is awesome  You can have it quickly interface with your Excel spreadsheets to pull in data about how high and fast rockets are flying  how the wind affects those same rockets  and how different engines matter  Beyond rocketry  similar concepts come into play for cars  trucks  aircraft  spacecraft  and even athletics  You can pull in large amounts of data  manipulate all of it  and make sure your results are as they should be  In the event something is off  you can add a line break where an error occurs to debug your program without having to recompile every time you want to run your program  Is it slower than some other programs  Well  technically  I m sure if you want to do the number crunching it s great for on an NVIDIA graphics processor  it would probably be faster  but it requires a lot more effort with harder debugging   As a general programming language  MATLAB is weak  It s not meant to work against Python  Java  ActionScript  C C   or any other general purpose language  It s meant for the engineering and mathematics niche the name implies  and it does so fantastically

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MATLAB is a fantastic tool for    prototyping  engineering simulation and  fast visualization of data   You can really play with  visualize and test your ideas on a data set very effectively  It should not be regarded as an alternative to other software languages used for product development  I highly recommend it for the above tasks  though it is expensive - free alternatives like Octave and Python are catching up

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I think you answered your own question when you noted that Matlab is  cool to work with matrixes and plotting things   Any application that requires a lot of matrix maths and visualisation will probably be easiest to do in Matlab   That said  Matlab s syntax feels awkward and shows the language s age  In contrast  Python is a much nicer general purpose programming language and  with the right libraries can do much of what Matlab does  However  Matlab is always going to have a more concise syntax than Python for vector and matrix manipulation    If much of your programming involves these sorts of manipulations  such as in signal processing and some statistical techniques  then Matlab will be a better choice

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The most likely reason that it s used so much in universities is that the mathematics faculty are used to it  understand it  and know how to incorporate it into their curriculum

User · Answer

I think you answered your own question when you noted that Matlab is  cool to work with matrixes and plotting things   Any application that requires a lot of matrix maths and visualisation will probably be easiest to do in Matlab   That said  Matlab s syntax feels awkward and shows the language s age  In contrast  Python is a much nicer general purpose programming language and  with the right libraries can do much of what Matlab does  However  Matlab is always going to have a more concise syntax than Python for vector and matrix manipulation    If much of your programming involves these sorts of manipulations  such as in signal processing and some statistical techniques  then Matlab will be a better choice

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I ve been using matlab for many years in my research   It s great for linear algebra and has a large set of well-written toolboxes   The most recent versions are starting to push it into being closer to a general-purpose language  better optimizers  a much better object model  richer scoping rules  etc       This past summer  I had a job where I used Python   numpy instead of Matlab   I enjoyed the change of pace   It s a  real  language  and all that entails   and it has some great numeric features like broadcasting arrays   I also really like the ipython environment     Here are some things that I prefer about Matlab    consistency  MathWorks has spent a lot of effort making the toolboxes look and work like each other   They haven t done a perfect job  but it s one of the best I ve seen for a codebase that s decades old  documentation  I find it very frustrating to figure out some things in numpy and or python because the documentation quality is spotty  some things are documented very well  some not at all   It s often most frustrating when I see things that appear to mimic Matlab  but don t quite work the same   Being able to grab the source is invaluable  to be fair  most of the Matlab toolboxes ship with source too  compactness  for what I do  Matlab s syntax is often more compact  but not always  momentum  I have too much Matlab code to change now   If I didn t have such a large existing codebase  I d seriously consider switching to Python   numpy

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Between matplotlib pylab and NumPy I don t think there s much actual difference between Matlab and python other than cultural inertia as suggested by  Adam Bellaire

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Hold everything  When s the last time you programed your calculator to play tetris  Did you actually think you could write anything you want in those 128k of RAM  Likely not  MATLAB is not for programming unless you re dealing with huge matrices  It s the graphing calculator you whip out when you ve got Megabytes to Gigabytes of data to crunch and or plot  Learn just basic stuff  but also don t kill yourself trying to make Python be a graphing calculator   You ll quickly get a feel for when you want to crunch  plot or explore in MATLAB and when you want to have all that Python offers  Lots of engineers turn to pre and post processing in Python or Perl  Occasionally even just calling out to MATLAB for the hard bits   They are such completely different tools that you should learn their basic strengths first without trying to replace one with the other  Granted for saving money I d either use Octave or skimp on ease and learn to work with sparse matrices in Perl or Python

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First Mover Advantage   Matlab has been around since the late 1970s   Python came along more recently  and the libraries that make it suitable for Matlab type tasks came along even more recently   People are used to Matlab  so they use it

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It s been some time since I ve used Matlab  but from memory it does provide  albeit with extra plugins  the ability to generate source to allow you to realise your algorithm on a DSP   Since python is a general purpose programming language there is no reason why you couldn t do everything in python that you can do in matlab  However  matlab does provide a number of other tools - eg  a very broad array of dsp features  a broad array of S and Z domain features   All of these could be hand coded in python  since it s a general purpose language   but if all you re after is the results perhaps spending the money on Matlab is the cheaper option   These features have also been tuned for performance  eg  The documentation for Numpy specifies that their Fourier transform is optimised for power of 2 point data sets  As I understand Matlab has been written to use the most efficient Fourier transform to suit the size of the data set  not just power of 2   edit  Oh  and in Matlab you can produce some sensational looking plots very easily  which is important when you re presenting your data  Again  certainly not impossible using other tools

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I believe you have a very good point and it s one that has been raised in the company where I work  The company is limited in it s ability to apply matlab because of the licensing costs involved  One developer proved that Python was a very suitable replacement but it fell on ignorant ears because to the owners of those ears      No-one in the company knew Python although many of us wanted to use it   MatLab has a name  a company  and task force behind it to solve any problems  There were some  but not a lot  of legacy MatLab projects that would need to be re-written    If it s worth   10 000      it s gotta be worth it     I m with you here  Python is a very good replacement for MatLab   I should point out that I ve been told the company uses maybe 5  to 10  of MatLabs capabilities and that is the basis for my agreement with the original poster

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I think you answered your own question when you noted that Matlab is  cool to work with matrixes and plotting things   Any application that requires a lot of matrix maths and visualisation will probably be easiest to do in Matlab   That said  Matlab s syntax feels awkward and shows the language s age  In contrast  Python is a much nicer general purpose programming language and  with the right libraries can do much of what Matlab does  However  Matlab is always going to have a more concise syntax than Python for vector and matrix manipulation    If much of your programming involves these sorts of manipulations  such as in signal processing and some statistical techniques  then Matlab will be a better choice

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MATLAB is a popular and widely adapted piece of a sophisticated software package  It d be a mistake to think it s merely a math software since it has a wide range of  toolboxes   I recently used Matplotlib to plot some data from a database and it did the job without needing all the bells and whistles of MATLAB  However  it may not be proper to compare Python and MATLAB in every situation  As with everything else the decision depends on what you need to do   I used MATLAB in undergrad for control systems design and simulation and also for image processing in grad school  For these fields MATLAB makes the most sense because of the powerful control and image processing toolboxes  As everyone mentioned  array operations  which are used in every MATLAB script you d need to write  are very easy with MATLAB   Another nice thing about MATLAB is that it s very easy and fast to do prototyping and trying out ideas using the built in toolbox functions  For instance  it takes no effort to import an image and compute it s histogram or do some simple processing on it  One disadvantage of MATLAB could be it s speed because of its interpreted nature  However  if one really needs speed than he can choose to implement the tested logic in C C    etc   For further comparison with Python  I can say that MATLAB provides a full package for you to do your work without the need of looking around for external libraries and implementing extra functions   One last point about MATLAB which I see is not mentioned in the answers here is that it has a very powerful visual modeling simulation environment called Simulink  It s easier to design and simulate larger systems with Simulink   Finally  again  it all depends on the problem you need to solve  If your problem domain can make use of one of MATLAB s toolboxes and you have access to MATLAB then you can be sure that you ll have the right tool to solve it

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MATLAB is a popular and widely adapted piece of a sophisticated software package  It d be a mistake to think it s merely a math software since it has a wide range of  toolboxes   I recently used Matplotlib to plot some data from a database and it did the job without needing all the bells and whistles of MATLAB  However  it may not be proper to compare Python and MATLAB in every situation  As with everything else the decision depends on what you need to do   I used MATLAB in undergrad for control systems design and simulation and also for image processing in grad school  For these fields MATLAB makes the most sense because of the powerful control and image processing toolboxes  As everyone mentioned  array operations  which are used in every MATLAB script you d need to write  are very easy with MATLAB   Another nice thing about MATLAB is that it s very easy and fast to do prototyping and trying out ideas using the built in toolbox functions  For instance  it takes no effort to import an image and compute it s histogram or do some simple processing on it  One disadvantage of MATLAB could be it s speed because of its interpreted nature  However  if one really needs speed than he can choose to implement the tested logic in C C    etc   For further comparison with Python  I can say that MATLAB provides a full package for you to do your work without the need of looking around for external libraries and implementing extra functions   One last point about MATLAB which I see is not mentioned in the answers here is that it has a very powerful visual modeling simulation environment called Simulink  It s easier to design and simulate larger systems with Simulink   Finally  again  it all depends on the problem you need to solve  If your problem domain can make use of one of MATLAB s toolboxes and you have access to MATLAB then you can be sure that you ll have the right tool to solve it

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It s been some time since I ve used Matlab  but from memory it does provide  albeit with extra plugins  the ability to generate source to allow you to realise your algorithm on a DSP   Since python is a general purpose programming language there is no reason why you couldn t do everything in python that you can do in matlab  However  matlab does provide a number of other tools - eg  a very broad array of dsp features  a broad array of S and Z domain features   All of these could be hand coded in python  since it s a general purpose language   but if all you re after is the results perhaps spending the money on Matlab is the cheaper option   These features have also been tuned for performance  eg  The documentation for Numpy specifies that their Fourier transform is optimised for power of 2 point data sets  As I understand Matlab has been written to use the most efficient Fourier transform to suit the size of the data set  not just power of 2   edit  Oh  and in Matlab you can produce some sensational looking plots very easily  which is important when you re presenting your data  Again  certainly not impossible using other tools

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Personally  I tend to think of Matlab as an interactive matrix calculator and plotting tool with a few scripting capabilities  rather than as a full-fledged programming language like Python or C   The reason for its success is that matrix stuff and plotting work out of the box  and you can do a few very specific things in it with virtually no actual programming knowledge   The language is  as you point out  extremely frustrating to use for more general-purpose tasks  such as even the simplest string processing   Its syntax is quirky  and it wasn t created with the abstractions necessary for projects of more than 100 lines or so in mind   I think the reason why people try to use Matlab as a serious programming language is that most engineers  there are exceptions  my degree is in biomedical engineering and I like programming  are horrible programmers and hate to program   They re taught Matlab in college mostly for the matrix math  and they learn some rudimentary programming as part of learning Matlab  and just assume that Matlab is good enough   I can t think of anyone I know who knows any language besides Matlab  but still uses Matlab for anything other than a few pure number crunching applications

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The most likely reason that it s used so much in universities is that the mathematics faculty are used to it  understand it  and know how to incorporate it into their curriculum

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MATLAB is a popular and widely adapted piece of a sophisticated software package  It d be a mistake to think it s merely a math software since it has a wide range of  toolboxes   I recently used Matplotlib to plot some data from a database and it did the job without needing all the bells and whistles of MATLAB  However  it may not be proper to compare Python and MATLAB in every situation  As with everything else the decision depends on what you need to do   I used MATLAB in undergrad for control systems design and simulation and also for image processing in grad school  For these fields MATLAB makes the most sense because of the powerful control and image processing toolboxes  As everyone mentioned  array operations  which are used in every MATLAB script you d need to write  are very easy with MATLAB   Another nice thing about MATLAB is that it s very easy and fast to do prototyping and trying out ideas using the built in toolbox functions  For instance  it takes no effort to import an image and compute it s histogram or do some simple processing on it  One disadvantage of MATLAB could be it s speed because of its interpreted nature  However  if one really needs speed than he can choose to implement the tested logic in C C    etc   For further comparison with Python  I can say that MATLAB provides a full package for you to do your work without the need of looking around for external libraries and implementing extra functions   One last point about MATLAB which I see is not mentioned in the answers here is that it has a very powerful visual modeling simulation environment called Simulink  It s easier to design and simulate larger systems with Simulink   Finally  again  it all depends on the problem you need to solve  If your problem domain can make use of one of MATLAB s toolboxes and you have access to MATLAB then you can be sure that you ll have the right tool to solve it

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Personally  I tend to think of Matlab as an interactive matrix calculator and plotting tool with a few scripting capabilities  rather than as a full-fledged programming language like Python or C   The reason for its success is that matrix stuff and plotting work out of the box  and you can do a few very specific things in it with virtually no actual programming knowledge   The language is  as you point out  extremely frustrating to use for more general-purpose tasks  such as even the simplest string processing   Its syntax is quirky  and it wasn t created with the abstractions necessary for projects of more than 100 lines or so in mind   I think the reason why people try to use Matlab as a serious programming language is that most engineers  there are exceptions  my degree is in biomedical engineering and I like programming  are horrible programmers and hate to program   They re taught Matlab in college mostly for the matrix math  and they learn some rudimentary programming as part of learning Matlab  and just assume that Matlab is good enough   I can t think of anyone I know who knows any language besides Matlab  but still uses Matlab for anything other than a few pure number crunching applications

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Seems to be pure inertia   Where it is in use  everyone is too busy to learn IDL or numpy in sufficient detail to switch  and don t want to rewrite good working programs   Luckily that s not strictly true  but true enough in enough places that Matlab will be around a long time    Like Fortran  in active use where i work

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First Mover Advantage   Matlab has been around since the late 1970s   Python came along more recently  and the libraries that make it suitable for Matlab type tasks came along even more recently   People are used to Matlab  so they use it

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I believe you have a very good point and it s one that has been raised in the company where I work  The company is limited in it s ability to apply matlab because of the licensing costs involved  One developer proved that Python was a very suitable replacement but it fell on ignorant ears because to the owners of those ears      No-one in the company knew Python although many of us wanted to use it   MatLab has a name  a company  and task force behind it to solve any problems  There were some  but not a lot  of legacy MatLab projects that would need to be re-written    If it s worth   10 000      it s gotta be worth it     I m with you here  Python is a very good replacement for MatLab   I should point out that I ve been told the company uses maybe 5  to 10  of MatLabs capabilities and that is the basis for my agreement with the original poster

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Adam is only partially right    Many  if not most  mathematicians will never touch it   If there is a computer tool used at all  it s going to be something like Mathematica or Maple   Engineering departments  on the other hand  often rely on it and there are definitely useful things for some applied mathematicians   It s also used heavily in industry in some areas   Something you have to realize about MATLAB is that it started off as a wrapper on Fortran libraries for linear algebra  For a long time  it had an attitude that  all the world is an array of doubles  floats     As a language  it has grown very organically  and there are some flaws that are very much baked in  if you look at it just as a programming language   However  if you look at it as an environment for doing certain types of research in  it has some real strengths  It s about as good as it gets for doing floating point linear algebra   The notation is simple and powerful  the implementation fast and trusted   It is very good at generating plots and other interactive tasks   There are a large number of  toolboxes  with good code for particular tasks  that are affordable   There is a large community of users that share numerical codes  Python   NumPy has nothing in the same league  at least yet   Python  warts and all  is a much better programming language  as are many others    However  it s a decade or so behind in terms of the tools   The key point is that the majority of people who use MATLAB are not programmers really  and don t want to be    It s a lousy choice for a general programming language  it s quirky  slow for many tasks  you need to vectorize things to get efficient codes   and not easy to integrate with the outside world   On the other hand  for the things it is good at  it is very very good   Very few things compare   There s a company with reasonable support and who knows how many man-years put into it   This can matter in industry   Strictly looking at your Python vs  MATLAB comparison  they are mostly different tools for different jobs   In the areas where they do overlap a bit  it s hard to say what the better route to go is  depends a lot on what you re trying to do    But mostly Python isn t all that good at MATLAB s core strengths  and vice versa

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First Mover Advantage   Matlab has been around since the late 1970s   Python came along more recently  and the libraries that make it suitable for Matlab type tasks came along even more recently   People are used to Matlab  so they use it

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MATLAB  as mentioned by others  is great at matrix manipulation  and was originally built as an extension of the well-known BLAS and LAPACK libraries used for linear algebra   It interfaces well with other languages like Java  and is well favored by engineering and scientific companies for its well developed and documented libraries   From what I know of Python and NumPy  while they share many of the fundamental capabilities of MATLAB  they don t have the full breadth and depth of capabilities with their libraries   Personally  I use MATLAB because that s what I learned in my internship  that s what I used in grad school  and that s what I used in my first job   I don t have anything against Python  or any other language    It s just what I m used too   Also  there is another free version in addition to scilab mentioned by  Jim C from gnu called Octave

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First Mover Advantage   Matlab has been around since the late 1970s   Python came along more recently  and the libraries that make it suitable for Matlab type tasks came along even more recently   People are used to Matlab  so they use it

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Between matplotlib pylab and NumPy I don t think there s much actual difference between Matlab and python other than cultural inertia as suggested by  Adam Bellaire

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It s been some time since I ve used Matlab  but from memory it does provide  albeit with extra plugins  the ability to generate source to allow you to realise your algorithm on a DSP   Since python is a general purpose programming language there is no reason why you couldn t do everything in python that you can do in matlab  However  matlab does provide a number of other tools - eg  a very broad array of dsp features  a broad array of S and Z domain features   All of these could be hand coded in python  since it s a general purpose language   but if all you re after is the results perhaps spending the money on Matlab is the cheaper option   These features have also been tuned for performance  eg  The documentation for Numpy specifies that their Fourier transform is optimised for power of 2 point data sets  As I understand Matlab has been written to use the most efficient Fourier transform to suit the size of the data set  not just power of 2   edit  Oh  and in Matlab you can produce some sensational looking plots very easily  which is important when you re presenting your data  Again  certainly not impossible using other tools

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Between matplotlib pylab and NumPy I don t think there s much actual difference between Matlab and python other than cultural inertia as suggested by  Adam Bellaire

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Seems to be pure inertia   Where it is in use  everyone is too busy to learn IDL or numpy in sufficient detail to switch  and don t want to rewrite good working programs   Luckily that s not strictly true  but true enough in enough places that Matlab will be around a long time    Like Fortran  in active use where i work

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Adam is only partially right    Many  if not most  mathematicians will never touch it   If there is a computer tool used at all  it s going to be something like Mathematica or Maple   Engineering departments  on the other hand  often rely on it and there are definitely useful things for some applied mathematicians   It s also used heavily in industry in some areas   Something you have to realize about MATLAB is that it started off as a wrapper on Fortran libraries for linear algebra  For a long time  it had an attitude that  all the world is an array of doubles  floats     As a language  it has grown very organically  and there are some flaws that are very much baked in  if you look at it just as a programming language   However  if you look at it as an environment for doing certain types of research in  it has some real strengths  It s about as good as it gets for doing floating point linear algebra   The notation is simple and powerful  the implementation fast and trusted   It is very good at generating plots and other interactive tasks   There are a large number of  toolboxes  with good code for particular tasks  that are affordable   There is a large community of users that share numerical codes  Python   NumPy has nothing in the same league  at least yet   Python  warts and all  is a much better programming language  as are many others    However  it s a decade or so behind in terms of the tools   The key point is that the majority of people who use MATLAB are not programmers really  and don t want to be    It s a lousy choice for a general programming language  it s quirky  slow for many tasks  you need to vectorize things to get efficient codes   and not easy to integrate with the outside world   On the other hand  for the things it is good at  it is very very good   Very few things compare   There s a company with reasonable support and who knows how many man-years put into it   This can matter in industry   Strictly looking at your Python vs  MATLAB comparison  they are mostly different tools for different jobs   In the areas where they do overlap a bit  it s hard to say what the better route to go is  depends a lot on what you re trying to do    But mostly Python isn t all that good at MATLAB s core strengths  and vice versa

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MATLAB is great for doing array manipulation  doing specialized math functions  and for creating nice plots quick   I d probably only use it for large programs if I could use a lot of array matrix manipulation   You don t have to worry about the IDE as much as in more formal packages  so it s easier for students without a lot of programming experience to pick up

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Hold everything  When s the last time you programed your calculator to play tetris  Did you actually think you could write anything you want in those 128k of RAM  Likely not  MATLAB is not for programming unless you re dealing with huge matrices  It s the graphing calculator you whip out when you ve got Megabytes to Gigabytes of data to crunch and or plot  Learn just basic stuff  but also don t kill yourself trying to make Python be a graphing calculator   You ll quickly get a feel for when you want to crunch  plot or explore in MATLAB and when you want to have all that Python offers  Lots of engineers turn to pre and post processing in Python or Perl  Occasionally even just calling out to MATLAB for the hard bits   They are such completely different tools that you should learn their basic strengths first without trying to replace one with the other  Granted for saving money I d either use Octave or skimp on ease and learn to work with sparse matrices in Perl or Python

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Personally  I tend to think of Matlab as an interactive matrix calculator and plotting tool with a few scripting capabilities  rather than as a full-fledged programming language like Python or C   The reason for its success is that matrix stuff and plotting work out of the box  and you can do a few very specific things in it with virtually no actual programming knowledge   The language is  as you point out  extremely frustrating to use for more general-purpose tasks  such as even the simplest string processing   Its syntax is quirky  and it wasn t created with the abstractions necessary for projects of more than 100 lines or so in mind   I think the reason why people try to use Matlab as a serious programming language is that most engineers  there are exceptions  my degree is in biomedical engineering and I like programming  are horrible programmers and hate to program   They re taught Matlab in college mostly for the matrix math  and they learn some rudimentary programming as part of learning Matlab  and just assume that Matlab is good enough   I can t think of anyone I know who knows any language besides Matlab  but still uses Matlab for anything other than a few pure number crunching applications

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Adam is only partially right    Many  if not most  mathematicians will never touch it   If there is a computer tool used at all  it s going to be something like Mathematica or Maple   Engineering departments  on the other hand  often rely on it and there are definitely useful things for some applied mathematicians   It s also used heavily in industry in some areas   Something you have to realize about MATLAB is that it started off as a wrapper on Fortran libraries for linear algebra  For a long time  it had an attitude that  all the world is an array of doubles  floats     As a language  it has grown very organically  and there are some flaws that are very much baked in  if you look at it just as a programming language   However  if you look at it as an environment for doing certain types of research in  it has some real strengths  It s about as good as it gets for doing floating point linear algebra   The notation is simple and powerful  the implementation fast and trusted   It is very good at generating plots and other interactive tasks   There are a large number of  toolboxes  with good code for particular tasks  that are affordable   There is a large community of users that share numerical codes  Python   NumPy has nothing in the same league  at least yet   Python  warts and all  is a much better programming language  as are many others    However  it s a decade or so behind in terms of the tools   The key point is that the majority of people who use MATLAB are not programmers really  and don t want to be    It s a lousy choice for a general programming language  it s quirky  slow for many tasks  you need to vectorize things to get efficient codes   and not easy to integrate with the outside world   On the other hand  for the things it is good at  it is very very good   Very few things compare   There s a company with reasonable support and who knows how many man-years put into it   This can matter in industry   Strictly looking at your Python vs  MATLAB comparison  they are mostly different tools for different jobs   In the areas where they do overlap a bit  it s hard to say what the better route to go is  depends a lot on what you re trying to do    But mostly Python isn t all that good at MATLAB s core strengths  and vice versa

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I ve been using matlab for many years in my research   It s great for linear algebra and has a large set of well-written toolboxes   The most recent versions are starting to push it into being closer to a general-purpose language  better optimizers  a much better object model  richer scoping rules  etc       This past summer  I had a job where I used Python   numpy instead of Matlab   I enjoyed the change of pace   It s a  real  language  and all that entails   and it has some great numeric features like broadcasting arrays   I also really like the ipython environment     Here are some things that I prefer about Matlab    consistency  MathWorks has spent a lot of effort making the toolboxes look and work like each other   They haven t done a perfect job  but it s one of the best I ve seen for a codebase that s decades old  documentation  I find it very frustrating to figure out some things in numpy and or python because the documentation quality is spotty  some things are documented very well  some not at all   It s often most frustrating when I see things that appear to mimic Matlab  but don t quite work the same   Being able to grab the source is invaluable  to be fair  most of the Matlab toolboxes ship with source too  compactness  for what I do  Matlab s syntax is often more compact  but not always  momentum  I have too much Matlab code to change now   If I didn t have such a large existing codebase  I d seriously consider switching to Python   numpy

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MATLAB is a fantastic tool for    prototyping  engineering simulation and  fast visualization of data   You can really play with  visualize and test your ideas on a data set very effectively  It should not be regarded as an alternative to other software languages used for product development  I highly recommend it for the above tasks  though it is expensive - free alternatives like Octave and Python are catching up

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MATLAB WAS a wrapper around commonly available libraries  And in many cases it still is   When you get to larger datasets  it has many additional optimizations  including examining and special casing common problems  reducing to sparse matrices where useful  for example   and handling edge cases   Often  you can submit a problem in a standard form to a general function  and it will determine the best underlying algorithm to use based on your data   For small N  all algorithms are fast  but MATLAB makes determining the optimal algorithm a non-issue   This is written by someone who hates MATLAB  and has tried to replace it due to integration issues   From your question  you mention getting MATLAB 5 and using it for a course   At that level  you might want to look at Octave  an open source implementation with the same syntax   I m guessing it is up to MATLAB 5 levels by now  I only play around with it    That should allow you to  pass your exam    For bare MATLAB functionality it seems to be close   It is lacking in the toolbox support  which  again  mostly serves to reformulate the function calls to forms familiar to engineers in the field and selects the right underlying algorithm to use

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MATLAB  as mentioned by others  is great at matrix manipulation  and was originally built as an extension of the well-known BLAS and LAPACK libraries used for linear algebra   It interfaces well with other languages like Java  and is well favored by engineering and scientific companies for its well developed and documented libraries   From what I know of Python and NumPy  while they share many of the fundamental capabilities of MATLAB  they don t have the full breadth and depth of capabilities with their libraries   Personally  I use MATLAB because that s what I learned in my internship  that s what I used in grad school  and that s what I used in my first job   I don t have anything against Python  or any other language    It s just what I m used too   Also  there is another free version in addition to scilab mentioned by  Jim C from gnu called Octave

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Seems to be pure inertia   Where it is in use  everyone is too busy to learn IDL or numpy in sufficient detail to switch  and don t want to rewrite good working programs   Luckily that s not strictly true  but true enough in enough places that Matlab will be around a long time    Like Fortran  in active use where i work

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I ve been using matlab for many years in my research   It s great for linear algebra and has a large set of well-written toolboxes   The most recent versions are starting to push it into being closer to a general-purpose language  better optimizers  a much better object model  richer scoping rules  etc       This past summer  I had a job where I used Python   numpy instead of Matlab   I enjoyed the change of pace   It s a  real  language  and all that entails   and it has some great numeric features like broadcasting arrays   I also really like the ipython environment     Here are some things that I prefer about Matlab    consistency  MathWorks has spent a lot of effort making the toolboxes look and work like each other   They haven t done a perfect job  but it s one of the best I ve seen for a codebase that s decades old  documentation  I find it very frustrating to figure out some things in numpy and or python because the documentation quality is spotty  some things are documented very well  some not at all   It s often most frustrating when I see things that appear to mimic Matlab  but don t quite work the same   Being able to grab the source is invaluable  to be fair  most of the Matlab toolboxes ship with source too  compactness  for what I do  Matlab s syntax is often more compact  but not always  momentum  I have too much Matlab code to change now   If I didn t have such a large existing codebase  I d seriously consider switching to Python   numpy

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The most likely reason that it s used so much in universities is that the mathematics faculty are used to it  understand it  and know how to incorporate it into their curriculum

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MATLAB is great for doing array manipulation  doing specialized math functions  and for creating nice plots quick   I d probably only use it for large programs if I could use a lot of array matrix manipulation   You don t have to worry about the IDE as much as in more formal packages  so it s easier for students without a lot of programming experience to pick up

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I believe you have a very good point and it s one that has been raised in the company where I work  The company is limited in it s ability to apply matlab because of the licensing costs involved  One developer proved that Python was a very suitable replacement but it fell on ignorant ears because to the owners of those ears      No-one in the company knew Python although many of us wanted to use it   MatLab has a name  a company  and task force behind it to solve any problems  There were some  but not a lot  of legacy MatLab projects that would need to be re-written    If it s worth   10 000      it s gotta be worth it     I m with you here  Python is a very good replacement for MatLab   I should point out that I ve been told the company uses maybe 5  to 10  of MatLabs capabilities and that is the basis for my agreement with the original poster

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Matlab is good at doing number crunching  Also Matrix and matrix manipulation  It has many helpful built in libraries depends on the what version  I think it is easier to use than python if you are going to be calculating equations

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The main reason it is useful in industry is the plug-ins built on top of the core functionality  Almost all active Matlab development for the last few years has focused on these     Unfortunately  you won t have much opportunity to use these in an academic environment

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MATLAB WAS a wrapper around commonly available libraries  And in many cases it still is   When you get to larger datasets  it has many additional optimizations  including examining and special casing common problems  reducing to sparse matrices where useful  for example   and handling edge cases   Often  you can submit a problem in a standard form to a general function  and it will determine the best underlying algorithm to use based on your data   For small N  all algorithms are fast  but MATLAB makes determining the optimal algorithm a non-issue   This is written by someone who hates MATLAB  and has tried to replace it due to integration issues   From your question  you mention getting MATLAB 5 and using it for a course   At that level  you might want to look at Octave  an open source implementation with the same syntax   I m guessing it is up to MATLAB 5 levels by now  I only play around with it    That should allow you to  pass your exam    For bare MATLAB functionality it seems to be close   It is lacking in the toolbox support  which  again  mostly serves to reformulate the function calls to forms familiar to engineers in the field and selects the right underlying algorithm to use

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I ve been using matlab for many years in my research   It s great for linear algebra and has a large set of well-written toolboxes   The most recent versions are starting to push it into being closer to a general-purpose language  better optimizers  a much better object model  richer scoping rules  etc       This past summer  I had a job where I used Python   numpy instead of Matlab   I enjoyed the change of pace   It s a  real  language  and all that entails   and it has some great numeric features like broadcasting arrays   I also really like the ipython environment     Here are some things that I prefer about Matlab    consistency  MathWorks has spent a lot of effort making the toolboxes look and work like each other   They haven t done a perfect job  but it s one of the best I ve seen for a codebase that s decades old  documentation  I find it very frustrating to figure out some things in numpy and or python because the documentation quality is spotty  some things are documented very well  some not at all   It s often most frustrating when I see things that appear to mimic Matlab  but don t quite work the same   Being able to grab the source is invaluable  to be fair  most of the Matlab toolboxes ship with source too  compactness  for what I do  Matlab s syntax is often more compact  but not always  momentum  I have too much Matlab code to change now   If I didn t have such a large existing codebase  I d seriously consider switching to Python   numpy

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One reason MATLAB is popular with universities is the same reason a lot of things are popular with universities  there s a lot of professors familiar with it  and it s fairly robust   I ve spoken to a lot of folks who are especially interested in MATLAB s nascent ability to tap into the GPU instead of working serially   Having used Python in grad school  I kind of wish I had the licks to work with MATLAB in that case   It sure would make vector space calculations a breeze

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One reason MATLAB is popular with universities is the same reason a lot of things are popular with universities  there s a lot of professors familiar with it  and it s fairly robust   I ve spoken to a lot of folks who are especially interested in MATLAB s nascent ability to tap into the GPU instead of working serially   Having used Python in grad school  I kind of wish I had the licks to work with MATLAB in that case   It sure would make vector space calculations a breeze

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MATLAB WAS a wrapper around commonly available libraries  And in many cases it still is   When you get to larger datasets  it has many additional optimizations  including examining and special casing common problems  reducing to sparse matrices where useful  for example   and handling edge cases   Often  you can submit a problem in a standard form to a general function  and it will determine the best underlying algorithm to use based on your data   For small N  all algorithms are fast  but MATLAB makes determining the optimal algorithm a non-issue   This is written by someone who hates MATLAB  and has tried to replace it due to integration issues   From your question  you mention getting MATLAB 5 and using it for a course   At that level  you might want to look at Octave  an open source implementation with the same syntax   I m guessing it is up to MATLAB 5 levels by now  I only play around with it    That should allow you to  pass your exam    For bare MATLAB functionality it seems to be close   It is lacking in the toolbox support  which  again  mostly serves to reformulate the function calls to forms familiar to engineers in the field and selects the right underlying algorithm to use

User · Answer

MATLAB is great for doing array manipulation  doing specialized math functions  and for creating nice plots quick   I d probably only use it for large programs if I could use a lot of array matrix manipulation   You don t have to worry about the IDE as much as in more formal packages  so it s easier for students without a lot of programming experience to pick up

User · Answer

MATLAB is a fantastic tool for    prototyping  engineering simulation and  fast visualization of data   You can really play with  visualize and test your ideas on a data set very effectively  It should not be regarded as an alternative to other software languages used for product development  I highly recommend it for the above tasks  though it is expensive - free alternatives like Octave and Python are catching up

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It s been some time since I ve used Matlab  but from memory it does provide  albeit with extra plugins  the ability to generate source to allow you to realise your algorithm on a DSP   Since python is a general purpose programming language there is no reason why you couldn t do everything in python that you can do in matlab  However  matlab does provide a number of other tools - eg  a very broad array of dsp features  a broad array of S and Z domain features   All of these could be hand coded in python  since it s a general purpose language   but if all you re after is the results perhaps spending the money on Matlab is the cheaper option   These features have also been tuned for performance  eg  The documentation for Numpy specifies that their Fourier transform is optimised for power of 2 point data sets  As I understand Matlab has been written to use the most efficient Fourier transform to suit the size of the data set  not just power of 2   edit  Oh  and in Matlab you can produce some sensational looking plots very easily  which is important when you re presenting your data  Again  certainly not impossible using other tools

User · Answer

MATLAB is a fantastic tool for    prototyping  engineering simulation and  fast visualization of data   You can really play with  visualize and test your ideas on a data set very effectively  It should not be regarded as an alternative to other software languages used for product development  I highly recommend it for the above tasks  though it is expensive - free alternatives like Octave and Python are catching up

User · Answer

The main reason it is useful in industry is the plug-ins built on top of the core functionality  Almost all active Matlab development for the last few years has focused on these     Unfortunately  you won t have much opportunity to use these in an academic environment

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Between matplotlib pylab and NumPy I don t think there s much actual difference between Matlab and python other than cultural inertia as suggested by  Adam Bellaire

[python] What is MATLAB good for? Why is it so used by universities? When is it better than Python?

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