MATLAB

FIRST-HAND READS

What people reported, in their own words. Every line links to where it was said.

• “after suffering at the hands of 1 based indexing in Matlab I will never touch those again if I have any say in the matter”

  NEGATIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2026-02-20

• “The number of times I've written arr[(n-1)m+1:nm] in MATLAB... I do not know how anyone can prefer that nonsense”

  NEGATIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2026-02-19

• “everybody in the aero industry trusts that MATLAB's results are accurate”

  POSITIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2025-12-17

• “Matlab's functions like to create row vectors (e.g., linspace) in a world where column vectors are more common, so this is a common occurrence.”

  NEGATIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2025-12-17

• “your work aligns closely with the type of runtime that I had hoped to write someday when I first used MATLAB”

  MIXED · features · Hacker News · 2025-12-16

• “the main advantage of using Matlab over Python is the plotting”

  MIXED · features · Hacker News · 2025-12-16

• “Matlab was indispensable (control loop design, system identification, all sorts of signal processing and E&M stuff). One of the best things about Matlab was that it had an absolutely enormous library of tools, I could reasonably do everything I wanted, and more importantly, all the notation and convention matched what was used in EE”

  MIXED · features · Hacker News · 2025-12-16

• “Matlab is nearly impossible to debug or even find basic workarounds for problems in this domain, in comparison to Python, because of how closed and niche Matlab is, and the lack of community and trustworthy documentation, or ability to write sensible code with performant for loops”

  NEGATIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2025-12-16

• “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.”

  NEGATIVE · features · Hacker News · 2025-12-16

• “does not have the capabilities of Matlab in the areas that I worked in”

  POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2025-12-16

• “most, if not all, of the Matlab scripts I had used for my research would now be useless”

  NEGATIVE · Hacker News · 2025-12-15

• “Every single matlab user has the ability to view exactly how ode45 is implemented and has the ability to audit that function.”

  POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2025-12-15

• “Open matlab and you can inspect all the implementation details behind ode45. It is not a black box.”

  MIXED · features · Hacker News · 2025-12-15

• “the main appeal to MATLAB was the REPL experience, allowing me to experiment with ideas and inspect results in the UI”

  MIXED · ease of use · Hacker News · 2025-12-15

• “Matlab is successful because of precisely one thing, which nobody has replicated. It offers a complete software environment from one source. Nowhere else can you get scientific computing, a GUI toolkit, a high level embedded software environment, a HiL/SiL toolkit, a model based simulation environment, a plotting and visualization toolkit and so much more in a single cohesive package. Nobody else has any offering that comes even close.”

  POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2025-12-15

• “I think the MATLAB JIT compiler is probably difficult to match.”

  POSITIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2025-12-15