Hacker News Reader

MATLAB is fine and could have continued to be the dominant player. MathWorks the company is hot garbage and basically destroyed the ubiquity of MATLAB.

That's pretty much the alpha and omega. MATLAB had a 20 year head start on everybody and wasted it because everybody hated MathWorks so badly.

View on HN

It's weird ... if you asked me to provide evidence for it, I would struggle to find THE ONE major thing (or let's say 4 or 5) that did this for me, but what you described is exactly how I feel about Matlab and Mathworks. Perhaps it was just death by a thousand paper cuts?

Which is odd, because while Octave is effectively 99% the same language, I adore octave and hate matlab with a passion.

The one aspect of the company I do admire however, is the quality of the documentation they provide.

Matlab documentation really sets the bar on this. Python doesnt even come close (let alone julia, where documentation is, alas, more often than not an afterthought...)

I'm curious, having heard of Matlab but never used it, what exactly did MathWorks do to turn everyone away from them?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com