Products · Product
MATLAB
Raised as a usability problem by 40 people on Hacker News over 16 years (2010–2025), in 39 threads.
People raised many different problems with MATLAB, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 43 complaints
- Getting nice vector plot output for PDFs was an unenjoyable experience2025-12-16
- Hard to debug and find workarounds; documentation not trustworthy2025-12-16
- Needing two licenses to run on two cores is a frustrating experience2025-12-16
- No broadcasting or chained indexing, so users must manually create temporary variables2025-12-03
- Legacy MATLAB code takes hours to decipher; poor debugging and tooling2024-06-28
- Doing functional-style code in Matlab is very annoying and very slow2023-08-30
- Considered basically unusable for computational math and algorithm development2023-03-04
- Errors are one line long with no stack trace or line number2022-12-28
- Nx1 vs 1xN ambiguity and forced matrix-everything design make code confusing2022-09-07
- Cannot read compressed CSV files, so large uncompressed files are needed2022-08-13
- When a program fails, students can't tell why, and stack traces are technical or point the wrong way2022-07-12
- Commenter found the software hostile to use during their degree2022-06-23
- Interfaces so complex that soldiers operating the equipment did not like them2022-05-25
- Converting LP and QP problems into standard form is very error-prone2022-04-21
- Takes about 3 seconds to launch, too slow for scripted runs2020-11-30
- Takes a long time to start and uses a lot of memory2020-11-30
- Slicing cell arrays gives unintuitive results depending on how the index is written2020-06-26
- Ribbon sections collapse into empty gray space and need extra clicks when the window is tiled2019-10-26
- Easy to overlook the dot in element-wise operators, causing garbage results to hunt down2019-07-03
- One function per file forces friction and headaches in prototyping and larger projects2019-07-03
- Recent versions of the documentation became less usable than earlier ones2018-12-28
- 1-based indexing forces awkward offset arithmetic when processing array blocks2018-08-16
- Interactive scripts become so slow beyond 100 lines that they are unusable2018-05-03
- Coding environment is horrible and makes working in it painful2017-11-01
- Buggy, unpolished interface that fits poorly with modern operating systems2015-12-16
- UI became much slower, with lag before button shading appears on click2015-12-09
- Matrix construction silently produces unexpected dimensions due to ambiguous syntax2015-12-03
- Code with loops becomes unusable for anything but small arrays unless vectorized2015-07-02
- Dislikes the language's syntax and finds it inconsistent2014-04-04
- Indexing is painful and off-by-one-error prone beyond simple ranges2013-10-24
- Functions must live in separate files, making modular code organization frustrating and error prone2013-07-27
- Crashes every few hours with cryptic null-pointer errors, hard to debug2013-02-05
- Paging back and forth between help sections to find implementation details is time consuming2012-12-06
- Changing XTickLabels breaks other parts of the figure2012-10-16
- Functions need one file each, cluttering directories, or else are only callable within their file2012-05-04
- IDE is slow, memory-hungry, and crashes, especially over X11 forwarding2012-04-10
- Installing on non-Debian Linux is painful and error messages are cryptic2012-04-08
- Default indentation makes separate functions in a file hard to pick out2012-03-25
- Hard to scan a file with multiple functions and see where they separate2012-02-20
- Separate tools needed for zoom in, zoom out, panning and reading values; zoom jumps off-center2011-12-06
- Benchmark code needs a Matlab-only mex function, so it is a pain to run in Octave2011-02-10
- Subplot mechanism is awful and figure layout is hard to control2010-11-16
- Line editing is poor for inputs longer than a single line2010-03-22