[bilqis]

Because a lot of legacy stuff is written in Matlab. And Octave is not so much slower than Matlab. matlab’s killing features are all those libraries for everything.

And I for example don’t like using matlab - it’s not free (as in freedom), it’s very bulky, GUI is slow and heavy, there’s no way to use it as a console app in linux afaik.

[dagw]

GUI is slow and heavy, there’s no way to use it as a console app in linux afaik

You absolutely can. Many of the Matlab users I know never touch the GUI/IDE. They'll just code in Emacs and run their code from the terminal.

[Serow225]

I worked at the company that makes MATLAB, and the majority of engineers there ran it that way lol.

[newswasboring]

I've used MATLAB my entire professional life, never met a user not using the IDE. This is amazing to read. Perhaps a Matlab central article is warranted to describe this setup.

[evntdrvn]

I bet that someone like Ned Gulley might be interested in writing a MC blog entry on that subject! He’s super nice/approachable, and can be emailed at his contact info on his profile*

The original generation of MATLAB creators and developers like Cleve tended to come from an academic UNIX/mainframe/HPC type background, and so they were big CL users and lived in vim/emacs. And that carried over to a lot of the programmers working at The MathWorks to this day. For a lot of engineers I worked with who hack on the “guts” of the products (the language parser/interpreter/JIT, math internals, computational geometry and stats libraries, etc), the only time they’d fire up the IDE was at the pre-release bug bash every six months lol!

In my original post, saying the “majority” of TMW ran this way is probably an exaggeration, but a “sizeable minority” would be true. Maybe Ned could run an internal poll and include those results in the blog post :)

* https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/profile/authors/1409...

[jabl]

IIRC you can (or at least could 10+ years ago) start it without the GUI with "matlab -nojvm".

[komadori]

I used to do that too back when I used MATLAB professionally (also circa a decade ago), but I found with each successive release it worked less and less reliably as use of Java spread through MATLAB's internals.

[Serow225]

You can run it headless but with JVM, that’s pretty much the actual usable equivalent now.