While not a Matlab nor Julia user, I think you may be neglecting the nearly 40 years of code, toolboxes, and countless examples of common engineering problems solved in Matlab. Engineers tend to be more of a practical sort than developers, and just want to apply a known solution to a problem than mess around with newish software languages.
This is true, but even engineers see the advantages of Julia. My engineering school has went from almost pure Matlab usage to many key engineering courses switching to Julia due to its simplicity and friendliness.
It's also SOTA for many engineering applications, particularly for acausal modelling and scientific machine learning (see https://sciml.ai), which has led to big companies like Pfizer adopting it [1]. And for engineers writing novel libraries, it clearly has a strong edge. See for example the work by NASA's JPL [2, 3], the FAA [4] or the CliMa project [5].
Tools are valid regarding a context (when you have a hammer everything is a nail etc.). In the industrial context, Julia is not valid. In the research/education, it is valid. It does not mean that Julia will never be relevant in research.
Our upcoming JuliaCon 2024 has a significant number of industrial talks and a minisymposium. ASML uses Julia quite widely in a definitively industrial context.
What I mean is as a worker or student, I want to know if the tools I spend time on will be relevant in the industry. And I think I have more chance to meet companies working with MATLAB than Julia.
But if I want to work at asml Julia might be a good fit ofc.
One enormous difference is that MATLAB is paid, which, ironically, makes it much much easier to use in a corporate context.
For MATLAB it isn't just toolboxes, but also integrations with other tools. So it depends on what you are trying to do, but if your problem is taking in data, computing, putting out data, Julia can absolutely compete with MATLAB, even on the most practical "I really just want this to just work and look at the results", level.
Being paid does not make it easier to use in a corporate environment, that is nonsense. I specifically tried to ween my Mech E.’s off Matlab because I don’t want to pay for Matlab licenses for our company.
The big win for Matlab seemed to be there are pre-existing solutions/examples for hundreds of common engineering problems that only need to be tweaked for the problem at hand. Engineers like this. They seem pretty happy and productive in Matlab too, so I finally gave up and decided it was my best interests to let them use it.
>Being paid does not make it easier to use in a corporate environment, that is nonsense.
No, it isn't. It is the single biggest issue in getting it into your corporation. I can easily get a 10k Euro PC if I had any reasonable need for it which I could coherently explain to my boss. Getting Julia installed on it would take months of debates with IT and tens of thousands in internal expenses.
It is the same reason why corporations use Redhat, there is nothing about Redhats Linux which makes it inherently superior to e.g. Debian, definitely nothing that would justify the price. But corporations still willingly pay for it.
There are multiple reasons for this. First is support, if you aren't paying someone, there is nobody who will support you. Secondly is liability this is enormous, MATHWORKS is willing to take legal responsibility for their mistakes. That is a very big reason people use MATLAB, in some areas it is basically the only option for that reason. Thirdly paid software is easy to understand to everyone else, you wouldn't imagine how hard it is to tell people that something good is actually free and in fact so free that you can do with it whatever you want. If you aren't part of an enormous organization this might be hard to understand, but for most people free means "trial version" or "scam".