Agreed. MATLAB its set of downsides. On the plus side development is rapid and since 2008 it has good support for classes. We're starting to move toward python for future work.
> We're starting to move toward python for future work.
Thanks a lot for commenting. As somebody who does a lot of scientific coding in Python and part-time contributor to a couple of projects, I'm of course curious -- what's your reasoning behind the move and where do you anticipate to see the most friction?
A variety of reasons really. In no particular order:
- Still has good math support, rapid development
- Better OOP support
- More libraries -- everything from web development to scientific computing to GUIs to databasing
- More reliable, less buggy
- Better development tools -- code completion, testing, coverage, profiling, etc
- Free. Therefore can more easily be run on clusters without licensing issues or using the MATLAB MCR
I don't see any friction, except if one needed to port old code. It seems that a lot of people are moving toward SciPy/NumPy these days.
I think MATLAB itself isn't so bad, so much as the way its typically used -- poorly commented, organized, and untested. We put a lot of effort into clearly commenting and organizing the code. We used matlab-xunit and hudson to manage testing, which worked quite well. http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/22846-ma..., http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/33971-xm....