neuroscientists earnestly hating on MATLAB is pretty embarrassing for neuroscience as an intellectual discipline. you might as well shit on slide rules.
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Replying to @upbeatprof
Here’s the thing that irks me so much about matlab: poor/obfuscatory coding practices in Matlab are a feature, not a bug. It was made to be so approachable and easy that it sacrifices on best practices which is an enormous barrier to open science.
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Replying to @KenjiEricLee @upbeatprof
In Python, maybe you don’t need to follow proper OOP for something to work but it’s there for you when you’d like to learn. In Matlab, there is a barrier to how many tools of abstraction you can utilize. There’s a reason no software engineers use it.
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Replying to @KenjiEricLee @upbeatprof
And if I’m taking your point unsarcastically, I want to point out that Matlab is peddled to undergrads/grad students in the form of free licenses and pizza - it’s just not apparent to this audience why Matlab is so terrible unlike a slide rule which is obviously obsolete.
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Replying to @KenjiEricLee @upbeatprof
I say this with only a bit of hyperbole: so long as matlab occupies a lion’s share of the code in neuroscience, the field will never be truly collaborative. If I can’t understand your codebase (because matlab has awful structuring), I’m never going to contribute to it.
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Replying to @KenjiEricLee
All fair criticisms. Thank you. My point was that it was designed for a different time and world, like a slide rule. There are tools that are more suited for today's research tasks and work flows, but that's not a criticism of how well Matlab does the jobs it was designed to do.
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Replying to @upbeatprof @KenjiEricLee
My main criticism would be to underline how much harm it does to the younglings. And yes, it was designed a while back but nothing saves it from not having a BNF or a better way to do functions. Other languages had these things back then.
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Replying to @o_guest @KenjiEricLee
I cede the BNF point w/o hesitation! Again, all I'm saying is that it had its time+place, +many used it (and still do) to make substantial contributions. Most are outside of neuro. I carefully scoped my comment to highlight that, and I'm heartened at the responses here.
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Replying to @upbeatprof @KenjiEricLee
I think we largely agree. "This does not mean I believe the science done with Matlab is in any way worse in and of itself. By the same token, scientists who believe in open access do not think that science published in closed access journals is “bad science” — they think it is
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Replying to @o_guest @upbeatprof
Looks like you already wrote about all the topics brought up in this thread a year ago! Thanks for the link to your excellent blog.
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Oh, my gosh! You are so sweet. 
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