[polalavik]

very relevant. Mathworks has an iron grip on the defense industry and academia. Like others have said, because of simulink and a paradigm called "model based engineering". Simulink is nice, especially HDL coding tools because writing HDL by hand can be a real pain. I wish Octave made an open source - maybe one day.

[mrdrrobots]

As someone who works at a DoD FFRDC, I can confirm this is true. Matlab is the language of choice for 95% of my colleagues who have no CS or programming background, the other 5% is Labview. They write spaghetti code to get the job done. I’ve been scolded for using Python or Julia in programs because no one else can use it/understand it. I’ve wasted hours setting Python environments up for people which is especially hard due to strict firewall rules. Even once it is setup, it is usually to run some script the found on the internet, if it doesn’t do exactly what they need, they give up and move on. Matlab on the other-hand is a one click install with all the packages pre-installed.