[wsay]

As someone who has designed and taught those courses, my experience (admittedly only one persons) is that you pick what will work with the least hassle - because you'll have plenty of hassle elsewhere and probably no real time to deal with any of it without making more.

[sillysaurusx]

This is actually one of my favorite comments of all time, because it's how software wins. The software that students use is the software the industry uses about five years later.

[nh2]

Not always.

One of our machine learning courses was taught in Matlab.

Unsurprisingly, nobody used Matlab after uni, or 5 years later.

[lmpdev]

Also did an algorithms in machine learning course in matlab

It’s a great language choice for it

It weeded out the script kiddies who incorrectly signed up wanting a Tensorflow or PyTorch course

It’s a fairly bland and slow but usable language for the task

Shits me off to no end a lot of engineering courses moreorless indoctrinate their students into using it unconditionally, though

Octave exists but is a relative pain to use

[plaguuuuuu]

It's still a pain spending time learning matlab syntax/semantics when you could just, idk, use C or Haskell instead

[gibolt]

Matlab is fairly easy to work with (initially) and is great when learning a new concept, instead of learning that plus arbitrary syntax of the tool.

It isn't particularly fast though, and the simplicity quickly becomes an obstacle when solving a real problem.

[TremendousJudge]

My experience in university was the exact opposite. The stuff we were using was 5-10 years behind what industry was using.

[chii]

> The software that students use is the software the industry uses about five years later.

which is why it's anti-competitive for a company to sponsor university courses (such as providing educational versions for free). It should be disallowed, unless the course is _specifically_ teaching the software, rather than a general course.

[paulddraper]

That's competitive, not anti-competitive.

Anti-competitive means others are not allowed to do the same.

[chii]

> others are not allowed to do the same.

it's usually the case where the sponsor is the sole sponsors (aka, the course does not teach both X and Y, esp. if X is given to the uni for free).

It's anti-competitive to allow companies to embed themselves in general courses, despite it not being so by the letter of the laws.

[zamfi]

Sort of -- but basically no course is going to teach X and Y, if they're functionally equivalent ways to learn about Z, because almost no course is specifically about X or Y, it's about Z, and learning both X and Y isn't germane to learning Z, just learning one is enough.

As long as the companies behind X and Y both have a fair shot at sponsorship, this isn't really anti-competitive. It's literally a competition in which the companies compete for student and faculty attention.

Anti-competitive would be a company saying "you must teach X and not Y in your class about Z because you use Xco's mail services" or some other such abuse of one contractual relationship for an unrelated gain.

[paulddraper]

They say "hey if you want to teach a class using X, we'll sponsor it."

A competitor can complete for that sponsorship. So long as it's done on direct merit of the value, there's no problem.

Anti-competitive would be providing products or services and forcibly leveraging that into an unrelated contract.