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by jakebol 3161 days ago
Jake from TileDB, Inc. Engineering as a discipline is conservative (for good reason). The tools and the processes they use change slowly. Matlab is still entirely relevant both in the sciences and in industry. There are people with huge amounts of domain knowledge (who may only know Matlab or Excel) that are increasingly called upon to analyze and interpret larger amounts of data. These "old farts" are the people engineering, designing, and debugging our modern world. Empowering people with domain knowledge to answer data driven questions is what the democratization of data science is all about. There is tremendous value in building bridges across communities and across generations here.

I say this as someone who helped in small ways to develop open source alternatives to Matlab.
3 comments
StanSeltser 3161 days ago
Stanislav, Seltser, Petacube agree with Jake. Matlab still has some unique features to it which many open source projects (eg python) don't have - eg FPGA integration, System Modeling and Simulation. Combine that with decent language, nice debugger and many strong industry-specific solutions its good bet its will be around for a while. The reasons people dump matlab is not that its overpriced but due to the lack of integration with big data systems and the fact that matlab license cost at large scale becomes untenable.Plus number of industries using these unique matlab features is relatively small.
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srean 3161 days ago
> These "old farts" are the people engineering and designing our modern world. Empowering people with domain knowledge to answer data driven questions is what the democratization of data science is all about.

BTW I don't begrudge that TileDB has MATLAB support.

I see plenty of modern scientific/engineering workload in my day job. From what I see around myself it is usually a handful of people set in their ways that are holding others back by keeping a ridiculously overpriced tool alive that has comparable if not better alternatives. I gather from comments that it is different in Europe.

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curious12345 3161 days ago
So Jake, how are the Julia bindings coming along?
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