Comment by clickety_clack
Comment by clickety_clack 20 hours ago
The R ecosystem has had a similar evolution with the tidyverse, it was just a little further ago. As for Matlab, I initially learned statistical programming with it a long time ago, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it in the wild. I don’t know what’s going on there.
I’m actually quite partial to R myself, and I used to use it extensively back when quick analysis was more valuable to my career. Things have probably progressed, but I dropped it in favor of python because python can integrate into production systems whereas R was (and maybe still is) geared towards writing reports. One of the best things to happen recently in data science is the plotnine library, bringing the grammar of graphics to python imho.
The fact is that today, if you want career opportunities as a data scientist, you need to be fluent in python.
Mostly what's going on with Matlab in the wild is that it costs at least $10k a seat as soon as you are no longer at an academic institution.
Yes, there is Octave but often the toolboxes aren't available or compatible so you're rewriting everything anyway. And when you start rewriting things for Octave you learn/remember what trash Matlab actually is as a language or how big a pain doing anything that isn't what Mathworks expects actually is.
To be fair: Octave has extended Matlab's syntax with amazing improvements (many inspired by numpy and R). It really makes me angry that Mathworks hasn't stolen Octave's innovations and I hate every minute of not being able to broadcast and having to manually create temp variables because you can't chain indexing whenever I have to touch actual Matlab. So to be clear Octave is somewhat pleasant and for pure numerical syntax superior to numpy.
But the siren call of Python is significant. Python is not the perfect language (for anything really) but it is a better-than-good language for almost everything and it's old enough and used by so many people that someone has usually scratched what's itching already. Matlab's toolboxes can't compete with that.