> Matlab users greatly value having a complete package with an editor, debugger, visualiser, profiler, and system modeller all in one.

That's a very good point. Julia's debugger and profiler are both horrifyingly bad.

The debugger is one of Julia's top priorities, and here's a debugger roadmap that Keno recently posted.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/julia-dev/-LTsBVRv1d...

After many years, we've finally had something that very roughly approaches that in the Octave GUI. I've heard lots of good things about our GUI, but I know we're still very far from the polish of Matlab in this department.

Do you really think profiling is so horrifyingly bad in Julia with ProfileView? Imho, I cannot see what Matlab offers on top of that, but that may just be me.

I think ProfileView is great at displaying flame graphs, but there's more to profiling than can be interpreted from a single graph. For example, it doesn't separate execution time from number of executions.

If you don't understand other people, wonder then dig deeper. Don't make it an argument against those people.

A: "X is stupid, Y is much better!" B: "Are you sure X is stupid? How is Y better?" C: "Don't argue, B! Dig deeper."

You figure out who's who.

I was merely trying to understand why thebooktocome thought the profiler was so bad.

You're obviously the clever one.

I meant no harm, and as you can see, thebooktocome actually understood my comment, and has given me a useful answer.

Have a nice day.

Sorry then it was my bad English, as I'm no native speaker, as "Do you really think profiling is so ..." I did not understand as a honest inquiry, mainly because of your usage of "really" and your unconventional - I might say defensive - use of "Imho" in "Imho, I cannot see what Matlab ..." where I understood "Imho" as "In my humble opinion" expanded to "In my humble opinion, I cannot see what ...".

Also your words with the easy usage of "stupid" led me - wrongly! - into the direction that you might not be interested in understanding why users prefer Matlab, but more in expressing your opinion about the topic.

And to be frank, again perhaps due to my weak understanding of English, your usage of "You figure out who's who." and "Have a nice day" to me do not sound as the intention of trying to understand things but more on making clever remarks. But as I've pointed out, this might be due to the fact that English is not my native tongue.

errm - if someone makes a point respond to the point rather than attacking the fact that they made it? What are the features that the Julia profiler should have? If you can say then I think that everyone will have made some progress.

Does Matlab have something like iPython notebooks built in? That is something that would be really nice for academic work.

Matlab scripts have a cell-mode, where you can execute modules of code. Cells are delimited by %%, and you can run a cell by pressing ctrl-enter, run and progress, etc.

In my experience (15 years), Matlab has been the best for exploratory data analysis. If you change a script, you don't need to worry about re-importing issues like in python; you can even change code DURING a debugging session, EVEN with GUIs. I have been using python+numpy+pandas for a few years now, and python just feels like there is an impedance there that I don't get from Matlab, primarily with graphics/matplotlib. But, deploying and sharing python is easier. I admit it could just be my experience with Matlab that biases me. I usually find that people bitching about Matlab don't like the language, and that is usually because they are viewing Matlab AS the language (like python), and not as a data exploration and analysis environment.

There's an IDE kind of environment as x0x0 mentions, but I think you're referring to the ability to mix code and text and figures all in one document? ~~MATLAB doesn't have that to my knowledge, at least not yet.~~ Strike that, there's MuPad, like the other comment mentions, though it is indeed rarely used in my experience.

Relevant to the topic at hand, Julia does have that functionality already, and it in fact (afaik) uses the same engine that's behind iPython, the Jupyter environment. There's even a web-based community version for people to try stuff out: https://www.juliabox.org/

I'm not sure what you mean by that exactly, but matlab has a very usable gui / visual editor for mac and windows (and almost certainly linux, but I'm not sure).

If you mean a packaged script more like a mathematica notebook, I don't believe so.

They've had the mupad notebook (http://www.mathworks.com/help/symbolic/mupad.html) ever since they replaced the backend of symbolic math toolbox from maple to mupad, around 2008 or 2009. But I don't think it's too popular with Matlab users, there's a certain simplicity to just having a plot come up in a new standalone window that can actually be surprisingly hard to accomplish cross platform. Often have to pick your poison of depending on Tk, Gtk, Qt, Electron, or running in a browser (which still doesn't feel right to a lot of people, and for the non-Python languages supported by jupyter the Python server backend is a non-trivial dependency that can be messy to deal with).

well, R2016a claims to have with the Live Editor something like this.