> An employer with math researchers isn't going blink at the $2k for a perpetual license, so anyone doing the work regularly gets Matlab who wants it.
Not all employers can splash for matlab. You might be right about a simple license, but in my experience most matlab developers rely on toolkits which ratchet that price up through the roof.
For one example, somebody I worked with rewrote the parfor functionality as a c extension, because we couldn't justify the expense of that addon for every seat. Not a great use of that math researcher's time, but it got the job done, I guess.
I and a couple others at my company showed that Python / Cython could be meet and beat matlab's performance, and we built up an open source stack that our customers love and contribute to -- good luck doing that with matlab.
Our physicists found that the only feature they needed of matlab was its plotting functionality -- so they rewrote that in their native lisp and moved on with their lives.
Today, we only need a few seats for some researchers with seniority. I can't say how much we're saving, obviously, but we eliminated a significant cost in two departments' budgets and our finance folks are quite pleased.
My regret in this is that I used to be a Sage developer, but I've only got so much sway at the company and GPL'd code is a no-go.
Matlab is very strong for controls, well beyond anything I've seen in Python, but for general numerical work and plotting I feel its advantages over numpy+scipy+matplotlib (if any) cannot justify the cost and loss of freedom.
Not all employers can splash for matlab. You might be right about a simple license, but in my experience most matlab developers rely on toolkits which ratchet that price up through the roof.
For one example, somebody I worked with rewrote the parfor functionality as a c extension, because we couldn't justify the expense of that addon for every seat. Not a great use of that math researcher's time, but it got the job done, I guess.
I and a couple others at my company showed that Python / Cython could be meet and beat matlab's performance, and we built up an open source stack that our customers love and contribute to -- good luck doing that with matlab.
Our physicists found that the only feature they needed of matlab was its plotting functionality -- so they rewrote that in their native lisp and moved on with their lives.
Today, we only need a few seats for some researchers with seniority. I can't say how much we're saving, obviously, but we eliminated a significant cost in two departments' budgets and our finance folks are quite pleased.
My regret in this is that I used to be a Sage developer, but I've only got so much sway at the company and GPL'd code is a no-go.