Matlab vs Python (was RE: Discussion: Introducing new operators for matrix computation)

[John Lull]

At the dawn of the third millenium (by the common reckoning), Paul
Prescod <paul at prescod.net> wrote (with possible deletions):

> Look, if you took a poll of all programmers in the world, only a small
> fraction use matrices very often. Therefore it is a niche. Most
> programmers use numbers and strings every day, however.

By that reasoning, cryptography ought not be part of the standard
distribution, either.  Nor should complex numbers.

A very large part of the *reason* it's not used more is that linear
algebra is simply *not* natively available in any common language
other than Matlab.