| Ehhh, as someone who did cognitive neuroscience in grad school and wrote non-stop Matlab 20 years ago, this is correct but insufficient. The toolbox and licensing situation sucked, but that's not why I hated it. At the time, we had massive issues with using Matlab with large fMRI/EEG/MEG data sets, and attempts to write naive matrix-based versions of code would occasionally blow up memory consumption, and turn a 3-week analysis into a 50-year analysis. So, yeah, I had to replace a decent amount of pretty matrix code into gnarly, but performant, for loops. Maybe the situation has improved since then, but I don't care to find out. --- Want strings? You had your choice of cells or 2D char matrices? Who ever thought char matrices were a good idea? strfind() vs findstr()? Even after years of Matlab, I had to double-check the docs to recall which one I wanted. --- Anything to encourage reliability or assist scientists in their workflows, like built-in version control? Nope. Or basic testing support for your ad hoc statistical functions? No. I guarantee there's a ton of Matlab code that produced biased/wrong results, and nobody knows because it produced numbers in the expected range, and nobody ever thought to check it. Mathworks was in a unique position to improve scientific code quality, and did nothing with it. --- Matlab really excelled at only two things: matrix math and making pretty plots. As soon as you needed to do anything else, it was unbelievably painful, and that's where my personal dislike came from. |
In my experience, those arguing for the value of Matlab are mostly 50+ years old, or are in an extremely niche industry using something like e.g. Simulink or other highly-industry-specific tooling, in which case it seems the considerations are irrelevant to something like 99.5% of the modern population.
Matlab will clearly be dead and irrelevant otherwise, in a short amount of time and in almost all domains.
EDIT: And few things indicate an out-of-touch / cookie-cutter or almost-certainly p-hacked neuroscience paper like the use of MATLAB. It is a smell for incompetent legacy research in this domain.