[willis936]

IANA numerical expert, but I have written a lot of MATLAB in the past decade.

There are NR algorithms not present in MATLAB that are very useful. When trying to find the nearest index in one very large monotonically increasing vector in another you could use interp1, but what is much faster is to do a binary search. There is no binary search function in MATLAB. It's lightning fast to use the NR-C algorithm for a binary search in MATLAB. If you want to find many nearest indexes, then interp1 likely faster.

[topaz0]

Note that the article is not about denigrating the algorithms, and is instead entirely about the license restrictions.

[willis936]

I know but a lot of HN comments about the algorithm quality. It seems like a moot point because even if the algos were obsolete, the license issues remain.

I don't think the algos are obsolete though.