# An informal comparision of Julia Packages vs Matlab Toolboxes
**URL:** https://discourse.julialang.org/t/an-informal-comparision-of-julia-packages-vs-matlab-toolboxes/42939
**Category:** General Usage
**Created:** [July 12, 2020, 12:26pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/an-informal-comparision-of-julia-packages-vs-matlab-toolboxes/42939 "2020-07-12T12:26:53Z")
**Posts on this page:** 4
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@sylvaticus](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/sylvaticus)
#### Post date: [July 12, 2020, 12:26pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/an-informal-comparision-of-julia-packages-vs-matlab-toolboxes/42939/1 "2020-07-12T12:26:53Z")
Just a thought.
I went to the [“fileexchange” section](https://fr.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange) 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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### Author:  [@jling](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/jling)
#### Post date: [July 12, 2020, 5:26pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/an-informal-comparision-of-julia-packages-vs-matlab-toolboxes/42939/3 "2020-07-12T17:26:30Z")
yeah MATLAB is like that, if MathWorks get that much money, they ought to provide the support and users should never complain right? 😉 /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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### Author:  [@Tamas\_Papp](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/Tamas_Papp)
#### Post date: [July 13, 2020, 6:47am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/an-informal-comparision-of-julia-packages-vs-matlab-toolboxes/42939/4 "2020-07-13T06:47:03Z")
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concurrent_Versions_System) was a novelty.
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### Author:  [@colintbowers](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/colintbowers)
#### Post date: [July 14, 2020, 12:31am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/an-informal-comparision-of-julia-packages-vs-matlab-toolboxes/42939/5 "2020-07-14T00:31:07Z")
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.