# MATLAB Hacker Approved page: https://hackerapproved.com/p/matlab/ 28 people recommended MATLAB in Hacker News comments, 36 had mixed feelings and 42 criticized it, November 2025 to October 2026. It was recommended in 7 of 12 months, in 15 threads. It does not meet the Hacker Approved badge rule. **Verdict:** More people criticize it than recommend it. Engineers and scientists recommend it for its broad single-vendor toolboxes, professional documentation and trusted results in math-heavy industries. Common caveat: licenses are expensive and hard to keep outside academia. Summary written by Claude from the comments below. ## What people warn about - Expensive, hard-to-share licenses (4 comments in the sample): "I liked Matlab, I was so used to it. Then I switched job, which meant I could not keep the company license for it." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48504320)) "the friction of dealing with licenses would make it hard to fully integrate a commercial package into my routine" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46284465)) "The licenses are (were?) prohibitively expensive outside of academia though" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46173248)) - Awkward outside matrix and numeric work (4 comments in the sample): "it's over-optimized for matrix math, that it forces you to think about everything as matrices" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46279928)) "Matlab is fundamentally not a great language. It's not great at interacting with data that isn't already blocks of numbers, it's terrible for UI design" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46181133)) "MATLAB uses 1-based offsets instead of 0-based offsets for matrices/arrays, which can make porting code examples from other languages tricky" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46291326)) - Costly to scale to HPC clusters (2 comments in the sample): "Matlab was better than Octave in many ways, till folks get the sticker-price shock for $3k/host in a commercial cluster." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49563137)) "it is really silly to pretend that MATLAB users can as easily make as good use of HPC clusters as everyone else can" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46298294)) - Weak reproducibility and version control (2 comments in the sample): "my frustration with academic code and specifically reproducibility, with Python and Matlab in particular" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49863337)) "write data analyses by hand, one at a time, in Matlab, without proper version-control or libraries" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48741119)) ## Why people recommend it - Deep engineering toolboxes and packages (3 comments in the sample): "Matlab especially had 'tool boxes' that you bought as add-ons to do specific engineering calcs and simulations and it was great" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46173034)) "Matlab was indispensable (control loop design, system identification, all sorts of signal processing and E&M stuff" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46287058)) "Matlab has serious packages in numerous engineering fields and it’s not anywhere close to easily replicable." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46283610)) - Strong for prototypes and proof of concepts (2 comments in the sample): "fantastic for prototypes and for getting a "feeling" before doing the expensive optimal implementation" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46279763)) "Codegen from Matlab/Simulink/whatever is good for proof of concept design." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46189468)) - Single vendor covers nearly every need (1 comment in the sample): "it is the only software package in the world where you can get basically everything you ever want to do with software from a single…" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46280623)) - Trusted results in aerospace and automotive (1 comment in the sample): "everybody in the aero industry trusts that MATLAB's results are accurate" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46300500)) ## What people recommend instead - [GNU Octave](https://hackerapproved.com/p/gnu-octave/): 16 recommend, 4 mixed, 6 criticize ## Where to get it - [Visit the official site](https://www.mathworks.com/products/matlab.html) ## The badge A product earns the Hacker Approved badge when at least 10 people recommend it, recommenders outnumber critics at least 2 to 1 (mixed feelings count toward neither side), it was recommended in at least 4 of the 12 months and in at least 5 different threads, and no single thread supplies more than half of the people who recommend it. Health and money products are never badged. ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "MATLAB", https://hackerapproved.com/p/matlab/ (28 recommend, 36 mixed, 42 criticize; Hacker News comments, November 2025 to October 2026). Counts updated 2 Nov 2026, with data through October 31, 2026.