The Popularity of MATLAB

From: MultiMATLAB: MATLAB on Multiple Processors by Anne E. Trefethen et. al.

MATLAB^® is a high-level language, and a problem-solving environment, for mathematical and scientific calculations. It originated in the late 1970s with an attempt by Cleve Moler to provide interactive access to the Fortran linear algebra software packages EISPACK and LINPACK. Soon a programming language emerged (programs conventionally have the extension .m and are called "m-files") containing dozens of high-level commands such as svd (singular value decomposition), fft (fast Fourier transform), and roots (polynomial zerofinding). Graphical commands were built into the language, and a company called The MathWorks, Inc. was formed in 1984 by Moler and John Little, now based in Natick, Massachusetts.

From the beginning, MATLAB proved greatly appealing to users. The numerical analysis and signal processing communities in the United States took to it quickly, followed by other groups of scientists and engineers in the U.S. and abroad. Roughly speaking, the number of MATLAB users has doubled each year since 1978. According to The MathWorks, there are currently about 300,000 users in fifty countries, and this figure continues to increase rapidly. In many scientific and engineering communities, MATLAB has become the dominant language for desktop numerical computing.

At least six reasons for MATLAB's success can be identified. The first is an exceptionally user-friendly, intuitive syntax, favoring brevity and simplicity at all turns without being so compressed as to interfere with intelligibility. The second is the very high quality of the underlying numerical programs, a result of MATLAB's intimate ties from the beginning with the numerical analysis research community. The third is powerful and user-friendly graphics. The fourth is the high level of the language, which often makes it possible to carry out computations in a line or two of MATLAB that would require dozens or hundreds of lines in Fortran or C. (The ability to link with Fortran or C programs is also provided.) The fifth is MATLAB's easy extensibility via packages of m-files known as Toolboxes. Many Toolboxes have been produced over the years, both by The MathWorks and by others, covering application areas such as optimization, signal processing, fuzzy logic, partial differential equations, and mathematical finance. Finally, perhaps the most interesting reason for MATLAB's success may be that from the beginning, the whole language has been built around real or complex vectors and matrices (including sparse matrices) as the fundamental data type. To computer scientists not involved with numerical computation, such a limitation may seem narrow and capricious, but it has proved extraordinarily fruitful.

It is probably fair to say that one of the three or four most important developments in numerical computation in the past decade has been the emergence of MATLAB as the preferred language of tens of thousands of leading scientists and engineers.