Python for Decision Makers and Business Leaders Transcripts
Chapter: Python vs.
Lecture: Python vs. MATLAB
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0:00
Python vs Matlab. This is mostly applicable if you're doing data science scientific computing, data visualization, things like that.
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So, let's put them side by side. Is Matlab open source? No way, no it is not. And Python, yes of course. Is it compiled? No, these are not compiled.
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Is it owned by a company? Yes, Matlab is owned by a commercial identity and Python is not. Do they have base-class libraries?
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Yeah, Matlab actually has super good base-class libraries. That's one of it's features, it gives you all these
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libraries to do scientific computing and mathematical stuff. Web capabilities? No. It's not for that, and Python, it's very strong.
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Database capabilities? Not really. Not in a general sense. Though, yeah, Python's very strong. Mobile app capabilities? No.
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Python is poor, but I believe Matlab is even worse. Desktop capabilities? No, not really. I know you can certainly automate Matlab
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but when you distribute it you have to buy licenses to Matlab and other funkiness so, I'm going to say no there.
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And again, Python does not win this super well. They have Qt and a few other things WX Python, for example but it wins in this competition here.
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Stack Overflow rank? Matlab does not appear on the list. I'm sure there are questions about Matlab on Stack Overflow but far as the analytics
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I'm going to put negative infinity here vs. the number 1 position. That's a big difference. TOB rank? Matlab doesn't appear there either.
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Even though there is a programming language there. Price? The price for Matlab is non-trivial. This is $860 per user, per year, in perpetuity.
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It goes on and on. So, you can actually buy a license for something like three times that, and it will give you a
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permanent license forever, all of those are infinitely more than free and this one is a huge, huge importance distinction, is Matlab a general purpose
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programming language? No, it's not a general programming language you can't build arbitrary things can you go build YouTube with it?
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No! Would you ever try to build Microsoft Word with Matlab No, that would be insane you can not do it. It's not built for that, why is that important?
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Because if you start doing you're analysis in your work in something that is not a general purpose language
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Matlab or Julia whatever, stay focused on Matlab, we build something in Matlab and we get it working
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and it's like ah this is really cool, couldn't we turn this into a great website or a cool product or, integrate this
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into our other thing? The answer very likely is no you can't. Because Matlab doesn't do that broader thing where as with
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Python, if you start building up your Jupyter notebooks and get some analysis going and then it's super easy to
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productionize that and put that into a service or package it up into an application, because you know what? Python does those things but this is a big
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big point about this general purpose programming language and, I think it's really important in the consideration
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you're making and then we have the scientific compunioun level, I'm tempted to put Matlab under very strong and Python also under very strong.
3:01
But why didn't I give Matlab as high of a score? If I had unlimited money, I'd believe they would be on par.
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But in order to do the extra stuff outside of the box of Matlab. What you do is you go and buy these tool boxes, you want to do wavelit decomposition?
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Cool that's a $1000 dollars per user, per year to add that feature to Matlab, where as with Python that's just another free thing you get
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off pipeei if you had unlimited money, I think their very much on par with each other, but because they go outside
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the box in Matlab you have to buy additional things and those are extremely non-trivial prices, I think that
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kind of takes a little bit away from the broad capabilities of Matlab. So, at least at the base level let's say Python and Winscp
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my interpretation is that it wins because you can go get all these other libraries like astropy and so on.