> I personally use Octave and/or Numpy
for several years now and never ever needed braodcasting.
But since it is still there there will be many users who need it, there will be some use for it.
Uhm, yeah, there is some use for it. Im all for explicit over implicit, but personally current broadcasting rules have never bothered me, certainly not to the extent of justifying massive backwards compatibility violations. Take It from someone who relies on broadcasting for every other line of code.