|
>A bit offf topic, but is Matlab relevant still? Yes, in traditional industries. Robotics, automotive, industrial automation, and aerospace are using it. From my experience in automotive, Matlab alone is not the sole selling point, but the proprietary tooling around Matlab for modelling, hardware-in-the-loop simulation and online calibration for various ECUs is unbeatable and saves the OEMs and manufacturers weeks or months of labor and debugging various platforms. And since it's the industry standard all automotive companies use it to collaborate on projects. There's also the important fact that many users of these tools are not programmers. They could be mathematicians, physicists, chemists, designers, process engineers, test engineers, test drivers, test pilots, etc. and the GUI block-diagram based visual programing paradigm of Matlab tooling allows them to quickly understand, collaborate and iterate on various control schemes that learning how to code. If you're a test pilot or a process engineer, it's much easier to look at a Simulink block diagram and quickly understand the process going on, than to start reading python code. There are no open source tools that can do all these things and nor is there a market for them as these companies don't mind sticking with Mathworks & Co. and paying them juicy license fees in exchange for getting the user-friendly tools they want that enables them to get the job done. The network effect is also too strong to disrupt. Every company in the Michigan area serving the auto industry is running Matlab and so is every company in Stuttgart and Bavaria as most big OEMs have international offices in all these regions which must collaborate together. I assume it's similar in aerospace with the likes of Lockheed, Airbus, Rolls-Royce and many other of their suppliers are also deeply entrenched in the Mathworks ecosystem. Basically entire industries, that don't get much air-time on the start-up focuesd HN, have standardized on Matlab. In a way, it's similar to the semiconductor industry that standardized exclusively on the tools from Synopys, Mentor Graphics and Cadence. Or how how the CAD industry is run by Autodesk, Siemens and Dassault. None of these players will be disrupted by open source alternatives any time soon. Or ever. |