[Beldin]

First up, as the gp explains, the cost isn't the biggest hurdle.

Secondly, research institutes have little money. For example: you may think the world has been on HDMI since somewhere around 2010 or so. Think again. End of 2021, my research institute replaced their monitors, which meant i no longer was using VGA out on a daily basis.

(Computers typically are on a 3- or 4-year replacement cycle; monitors, projectors, keyboards, etc. aren't. )

[kramerger]

Third, what if my university decided to buy Mathematica instead but this week I have to collaborate with this guy whose university Matlab?

[7thaccount]

If the code is only a few pages, I would expect it to be rather easy to translate for most cases.

Mathematica is a rare exception as it is generally used in a much more functional programming esque approach than the imperative/OO style common elsewhere. I find pushing data to black box Mathematica functions to be very simple (and they have stuff for practically everything), but some very simple stuff eludes me due to the language model.

So I guess your point stands (especially if it's a large code base).

[nine_k]

Translation may involve translation errors.

There's value in running exactly the code which a researcher used in research to evaluate said research.

[7thaccount]

I understand you now and agree.