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Comment by pwr-electronics | Hacker News Reader

IMO modern MATLAB with the right toolboxes is much more capable than Mathematica. Pricing is similar.

>> IMO modern MATLAB with the right toolboxes is much more capable than Mathematica.

...depending what you want to do. Anything symbolic is probably not a great fit for Matlab.

Never done symbolic math in Mathematica but I have done it extensively in SymPy and Matlab. The symbolic toolbox is surprisingly powerful and performant compared to SymPy and I've never really been left wanting more.

This is not my experience.

Mathematica has a LOT more integrated into the base product. Matlab requires a toolbox for nearly everything and many toolboxes cost more than a Mathematica license. I enjoy Mathematica, but find Matlab to be inferior to Python development and very expensive.

I think Matlab is starting to realize this, at least at the institutional level they are starting to offer all the toolboxes for a fixed price (much much lower than buying all the boxes individually)

That is good to hear about!

> many toolboxes cost more than

They're all priced the same for home use.

https://www.mathworks.com/store/link/products/home/ML

I don't care about home use. If my company wants to use Matlab, they shouldn't have to pay like $5k for the database toolbox and $5k for the optimization toolbox on top of my license.

It's still better than value-based pricing where you have to call for a quote and they try to figure out the maximum you'll pay.

MATLAB individual license for base product is actually lower, but toolboxes can cost a fortune. Student/Home version does not have several features inbuilt which have to be bought separately. Also the symbolic math support is dodgy. If I had to do Numpy type of operations only, I will take Numpy over MATLAB because its open source and free.

Symbolic math in matlab is vastly inferior to Mathematica, and the deep learning and reinforcement learning toolboxes are vastly inferior to the offerings in python.

However for control system design or digital signal processing I think matlab is superior to both, I also think the matlab IDE is severely underated.

These are just from my experiences, I’m sure each of these languages have other applications where they are superior to the other too.

I also speak with privilege as someone who has access to all these packages for free so..

imo, the problem with Matlab is that Julia is better in pretty much every way. even numpy has managed to outclass it.

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