An informal comparision of Julia Packages vs Matlab Toolboxes

Just a thought.

I went to the “fileexchange” section of MatlabCentral to have a look at user-provided “toolboxes”, just out of curiosity.

Maybe I just discovered hot water, but the comparison with Julia packages is astonishing. Already, most of the stuff there is tutorials/single functions. But, even if we select “Tolboxes”, these are for the very most part very basic, unfinished, incomplete functionalities.

There are very few toolboxes that are based on a versioning system, with proper testing and documentation, issue tracker… Basically, aside the official MathWork Toolboxes and a handful of other packages you are left alone…

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yeah MATLAB is like that, if MathWorks get that much money, they ought to provide the support and users should never complain right? :wink: /s

In reality I always see labs use MATLAB like AutoCAD, all official packages, some from third-party vendor (NationalLabs for one), and with home-brew legacy code stored on a lab computer without git repo / docs most of the time.

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It is important to keep in mind Julia and Matlab are products of a different era. Julia was conceived well after collaboration of programmers using version control to write free software became pervasive, git became a de facto standard pretty much everywhere, and unit testing trickled in into scientific computing. Then it kept picking up a lot of best practices from other languages (eg for reproducible environments).

It is tempting to pat ourselves on the back for being so organized etc, but a lot of this just comes from practices evolving (independently of Julia). Yes, a lot of legacy code out there is disorganized, buggy, and undocumented. But it may just come from 1990 when CVS was a novelty.

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The incentive structure of Matlab works against open source collaboration. MathWorks make a lot of money out of subscriptions to their Toolboxes. Why would they facilitate a package environment that would actively produce competitors to their business model?

In fact, the file exchange is so lacking in rigour that many “proper” MatLab packages are never listed there. I remember over a decade ago there was a fantastic, comprehensive, MatLab package for Financial Econometrics written by Kevin Sheppard. But if you wanted it, you downloaded it from his personal web-page. Similar stories exist for many other packages which were frequently just hosted by the authors university.

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