> MathWorks sees Julia as a real threat to the Matlab market share

I think Mathworks is feeling a lot of pressure from both Python & Julia. In the r2016a release of MATLAB, Mathworks essentially released a Jupyter (one of the first environments for Julia, and formerly iPython Notebooks) competitor with the 'Live Notebook'. Mathematica has had notebooks for quite a while, and the best Mathworks had was their MuPad suite. I think the prevalence of Jupyter definitely led to this development.

http://www.mathworks.com/products/matlab/live-editor/

On the other side of things, are you aware of any efforts in the open source community to close the gap between jupyter and Mathematica notebooks (i.e. editing of pretty-printed math expressions)?

I would really like to not give Stephen Wolfram money every year, but evidently not quite as much as I really like to be free of paragraph-form monospace code blobs from hell. I was hoping that MathJax meant I could wait a few years and have my cake and eat it too, but so far I haven't seen anything that looks serious :(

LyX and TeXMacs can do that kind of thing through Maxima plugins. The Maxima frontend itself has some prettifying capabilities. Of course, if you aren't doing symbolic math that is going to be less useful to you.

- http://www.texmacs.org/ - http://www.lyx.org/ - http://maxima.sourceforge.net/

> Mathematica has had notebooks for quite a while

Since 1988, I believe.

Certainly using Julia with Jupyter gets you much closer to having a reasonable IDE, though you'll have to be comfortable with cell-mode debugging instead of breakpoints and single stepping. I don't personally use it but I'm intrigued and would love to switch away from Matlab if there were reasonable feature parity or an alternate model that seemed reasonable for most basic tasks.

I'd really like to have a replacement for cell arrays and struct arrays, that have some of the convenient features of those structures. I know you can get this with lists of dictionaries in python, for example, but it's not the same.

There's now a true debugger: https://github.com/Keno/Gallium.jl Only works on master 0.5-dev right now, but it's coming along nicely.

Have you tried dataframes? Whether in Julia or Python, they're a good replacement for arrays-of-structs, though they need a lot of getting used to.

I've played around with them a little, but part of my issue is that our real-time data acquisition (in a neurophysiology lab) uses matlab/simulink so I'd need to create some middleware serializer to go from matlab data structures into dataframes. Not too difficult but there's a lot of momentum behind the matlab tooling unfortunately.

Try numpy record arrays