this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2025
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This encouraged me to work more in Python (though it is hard to beat Matlab in some applications).
Matlab is great, but I've never seen it used outside of an academic setting. Mathworks offers relatively affordable licensing to academia in the hopes of training future graduates to advocate for its use in a professional setting. However, their corporate licensing is crazy expensive, so it's usually worthwhile to just learn numpy/pandas or R instead.
One toolbox that I think Matlab is really excellent in is image analysis. I used it a ton on microscope images during grad school, doing image registration, and nothing I've tried since has made it as easy.
While Matlab is very convenient for modeling (what can be done as easy in Python), it excels in control engineering, navigation, and related problems. While very popular in academia, it's pricing causes that only the biggest companies can use more than a few toolboxes (Airbus, BMW, U$ "defense" molochs). I cooperate with a robotic company using Matlab (though large and government-owned). Great feature is the automatic C code generation (which is high quality when compared to the AI slop), however this toolbox is very expensive for industry. Symbolic computations are decent, but you can have the same with SymPy or maxima for free. Overall, for my purposes it's too good to abandon it completely.