It's the toolboxes and also SIMULINK. SIMULINK + Signal Processing Toolbox + Control Systems Toolbox is incredibly powerful for Physics and I don't think free implementations really touch that
NASA switched from SIMULINK to ModelingToolkit (Julia) for modeling spacecraft dynamics [0]. They found that the latter was much easier and gave a 15,000x (!!!) performance improvement.
I teach an undergraduate control course that uses Matlab. I'd love to use Julia (I use Julia for all my research) but last time I checked, it was not straight forward to interface to hardware using Julia (our labs use Matlab to control motors). There is a control systems package for Julia but it is no where as complete or polished as the Matlab control systems tookbox (or even the control systems package in octave).
No clue. Octave is here for us… so at least we can run their code and ask any pertinent questions to expedite the port. ;)
(Yes I know it’s simulink for many, but I’ve met some pure computational folk who swear by matlab as their prototyping tool and python is a bug ridden rat nest of footguns to them.)
Octave does exist, but it’s not covering the full set of things Matlab does. If your work is focused on the computational math side it’s fine, but if you have any interest in the simulation stuffs Octave hadn’t caught up and wasn’t even trying to, at least when I last looked a few years ago.
it's good to know that it did; i switched over to general software engineering a few years ago (worked in aerospace before). My college taught matlab as a class, and required you to buy the student version.
