MATLAB
Numerical computing environment in Developer tools
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.
28 people recommended MATLAB in Hacker News comments, 36 had mixed feelings and 42 criticized it, November 2025 to October 2026.
Summary written by Claude from the comments below.
106 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 28
- mixed feelings
- 36
- warn against or regret it
- 42
The record
Recommended in 7 of 12 months
In 15 different threads.
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 28 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 0.6 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 7 of 12 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
- Recommended in 15 threadsNeeds 5 or more, met.
- The biggest thread supplies 43% of its recommendersNeeds half or less, met.
The same rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. Mixed feelings count toward neither side. How the badge works
What people say about it
Reasons grouped from a sample of 40 of the 137 opinions about it, picked in proportion to how many people recommend it, have mixed feelings and criticize it. Each mark is one comment in the sample. Open a reason to read what they said.
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Expensive, hard-to-share licenses
“I liked Matlab, I was so used to it. Then I switched job, which meant I could not keep the company license for it.”
Comment from 12 Jun 2026 in “Please Switch to Python. Or R. Or Anything. Just Not Stata, SAS, SPSS, or Matlab” “the friction of dealing with licenses would make it hard to fully integrate a commercial package into my routine”
Comment from 16 Dec 2025 in “In Defense of Matlab Code” “The licenses are (were?) prohibitively expensive outside of academia though”
Comment from 6 Dec 2025 in “Wolfram Compute Services” - Comment from 15 Dec 2025 in “In Defense of Matlab Code”
Awkward outside matrix and numeric work
“it's over-optimized for matrix math, that it forces you to think about everything as matrices”
Comment from 15 Dec 2025 in “In Defense of Matlab Code” “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”
Comment from 7 Dec 2025 in “Wolfram Compute Services” “MATLAB uses 1-based offsets instead of 0-based offsets for matrices/arrays, which can make porting code examples from other languages tricky”
Comment from 16 Dec 2025 in “In Defense of Matlab Code” - Comment from 16 Dec 2025 in “In Defense of Matlab Code”
Costly to scale to HPC clusters
“Matlab was better than Octave in many ways, till folks get the sticker-price shock for $3k/host in a commercial cluster.”
Comment from 4 Sep 2026 in “How an MIT research project became the Julia programming language” “it is really silly to pretend that MATLAB users can as easily make as good use of HPC clusters as everyone else can”
Comment from 17 Dec 2025 in “In Defense of Matlab Code” Weak reproducibility and version control
“my frustration with academic code and specifically reproducibility, with Python and Matlab in particular”
Comment from 27 Sep 2026 in “Evolving programming languages in the AI era” “write data analyses by hand, one at a time, in Matlab, without proper version-control or libraries”
Comment from 1 Jul 2026 in “Claude Science”
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Deep engineering toolboxes and packages
“Matlab especially had 'tool boxes' that you bought as add-ons to do specific engineering calcs and simulations and it was great”
Comment from 6 Dec 2025 in “Wolfram Compute Services” “Matlab was indispensable (control loop design, system identification, all sorts of signal processing and E&M stuff”
Comment from 16 Dec 2025 in “In Defense of Matlab Code” “Matlab has serious packages in numerous engineering fields and it’s not anywhere close to easily replicable.”
Comment from 16 Dec 2025 in “In Defense of Matlab Code” Strong for prototypes and proof of concepts
“fantastic for prototypes and for getting a "feeling" before doing the expensive optimal implementation”
Comment from 15 Dec 2025 in “In Defense of Matlab Code” “Codegen from Matlab/Simulink/whatever is good for proof of concept design.”
Comment from 8 Dec 2025 in “The C++ standard for the F-35 Fighter Jet [video]” Single vendor covers nearly every need
“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…”
Comment from 15 Dec 2025 in “In Defense of Matlab Code” Trusted results in aerospace and automotive
“everybody in the aero industry trusts that MATLAB's results are accurate”
Comment from 17 Dec 2025 in “In Defense of Matlab Code”
What people recommend instead
The same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Mixed | Criticize | Approval | Months | Had for | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MATLABThis page | 28 | 36 | 42 | 40% | 7 | — | — |
| GNU Octave | 16 | 4 | 6 | 73% | 7 | — | Approved |
What people said
40 of the 137 opinions about it, picked in proportion to the three counts, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“it's generally slow (although there are ways to optimize it a bit more) and expensive”
“MATLAB was too expensive and also overkill, as we didn't really need the toolboxes.”
“my frustration with academic code and specifically reproducibility, with Python and Matlab in particular”
“Julia might just be the closest thing at the moment to Matlab without being a Matlab clone.”
“Matlab was better than Octave in many ways, till folks get the sticker-price shock for $3k/host in a commercial cluster.”
“I loved graphing calculators until I learned tools like Mathematica and Matlab.”
“write data analyses by hand, one at a time, in Matlab, without proper version-control or libraries”
“I liked Matlab, I was so used to it. Then I switched job, which meant I could not keep the company license for it.”
“Matlab definitely took a big hit in the last decade and is losing against the python numpy stack.”
“a lot of value in the implementation of many strong and fast algeorithms in computer algebra in proprietary tools”
“after suffering at the hands of 1 based indexing in Matlab I will never touch those again”
“everybody in the aero industry trusts that MATLAB's results are accurate”
“it is really silly to pretend that MATLAB users can as easily make as good use of HPC clusters as everyone else can”
“MATLAB uses 1-based offsets instead of 0-based offsets for matrices/arrays, which can make porting code examples from other languages tricky”
“idiomatic MATLAB style (every operation returns a fresh matrix) can easily become very inefficient”
“Matlab was indispensable (control loop design, system identification, all sorts of signal processing and E&M stuff”
“Matlab is nearly impossible to debug or even find basic workarounds for problems in this domain”
“it does not support true 1d arrays; you have to artificially choose them to be row or column vectors.”
“A very practical example is, as I mentioned, getting all differences between the elements of a time series”
“the friction of dealing with licenses would make it hard to fully integrate a commercial package into my routine”
“matlab is like what it would look like to put the math in an ascii email”
“The algorithms written in C and compiled by mex are the "built-in" ones that are not viewable.”
“If the algorithm is implemented as a compiled mex function, then you cannot inspect its details.”
“Matlab has serious packages in numerous engineering fields and it’s not anywhere close to easily replicable.”
“Mathworks seems to have set up licensing to maximize how much revenue they can extract”
“An underrated aspect of Matlab is its call-by-value semantics. Function arguments are copied by default.”
“Of the things matlab has going for it, looking just like the math is pretty far down the list.”
“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…”
“it's over-optimized for matrix math, that it forces you to think about everything as matrices”
“MATLAB forcing everything to be at least rank-2 solves a bunch of these headaches.”
“fantastic for prototypes and for getting a "feeling" before doing the expensive optimal implementation”
“my employers would often not buy Matlab licenses, or would make everyone share even when it was a resource needed daily by everyone”
“One such manager was impressed with Matlab because Matlab-generated C code was always MISRA compliant”
“Codegen from Matlab/Simulink/whatever is good for proof of concept design.”
“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”
“The licenses are (were?) prohibitively expensive outside of academia though”
“Matlab especially had 'tool boxes' that you bought as add-ons to do specific engineering calcs and simulations and it was great”
“It's much more integrated and natural to use in scientific computer languages such as matlab. However the reverse is also true”
“other specialized languages (e.g., SAS, Matlab) that are still used for domain-specific applications”
“seen the commercial host scaling cost of options like MATLAB usually ported to another language”
Counts come from 1,791,911 Hacker News comments labeled by Claude, November 2025 to October 2026, with data through October 31, 2026. Counts updated 2 Nov 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.