The title prompted me to look into the history of matlab a bit [1]. My main takeaways: - It was given away for free for years. During that time people wrote _r

The title prompted me to look into the history of matlab a bit [1]. My main takeaways: - It was given away for free for years. During that time people wrote _reliable_ numerical packages that other people glommed onto. - matlab users aren’t programmers, they are [engineers/mathematicians/etc.] who need to write some code to do their job. One aspect of this fact is that they generally aren’t on the hunt for a new “framework” to do this stuff. They also aren’t thinking much about long-term maintainability: they ran it once and got the answers they needed. - Academics (and students who can use university licenses) are price insensitive. - Engineering disciplines where errors can’t happen (civil, aerospace, etc.) come to rely on aforementioned reliable numerical packages, which eventually required proprietary licenses. [1] http://www.tomandmaria.com/Tom/Writing/MolerBio.pdf http://www.tomandmaria.com/Tom/Writing/MolerBio.pdf