It’s 11:43pm on a Monday night. My 6-week-old son is asleep in my office so my wife can get some uninterrupted rest for the first half of the night. He’s finally asleep now, and I probably should be also after a full day of work. But I’m not done for the day. Even though I’m a software engineer by trade, I’m also a computer programmer by hobby and passion. So I do what I’ve been doing for well over a decade now: I boot up my computer to write some code.
The main driving force behind use of proprietary software in educational institutions are the software companies themselves. They have an incentive in it. When the students graduate and join the workforce, their employers are more likely to choose the software that these new workers already know. So it’s like an investment for software companies to get their software into the curriculum. They spend considerable money and effort into it. Regular people stand no chance in pushing for free software - mainly because most of them don’t even care.
This is the unfortunate truth. Mathworks tools are heavily used in the engineering space, so it’s an obvious choice for academia to teach.
As much as I try to get my company off of Matlab/Simulink, it’s a challenge. Just so much legacy already written in it
I can’t agree. You could perhaps say Matlab is the default/non-critically-analyzed choice for academia. GNU Octave uses the same language as Matlab. A student who masters GNU Octave will be able to use Matlab just fine.
IIRC, Matlab’s significant difference is Simulink. So if a class actually intends to cover Simulink then it’d perhaps be fair enough for just that class to use Matlab. But even that’s not ideal. Ideal would be the school paying students to add what’s needed in GNU Octave.