[derstander]

> What prevents matlab users from switching? The syntax is similar.

I’ll offer my perspective. I’m switching little-by-little. Why don’t I just rip off the bandaid and switch whole-hog immediately? The literally twenty years of tools I’ve developed in MATLAB.

At work, I’m paid to perform analyses, develop algorithms, and document that work to my colleagues and our sponsors. I’m not paid to learn Julia. If I’m working on something completely novel where none of the MATLAB building blocks I’ve wrote over the years are useful, or the porting time is a small (for some arbitrary and subjective definition) of the overall task time, then I’ll do it in Julia.

The toolboxes aren’t a huge sticking point for me: Mathworks has only somewhat recently developed toolboxes geared toward my particular domain, so none of my code relies on them. My ability to share with colleagues is a bit of a sticking point. We’re predominantly a MATLAB shop (and this seems true not just at my company, but in our particular niche in industry). There has been some movement toward Python. But if it’s anything like the transition from Fortran to MATLAB — which was still on-going when I started in the early 2000s — then a full switch to either Python or Julia is still a ways off.