GNU Octave: A high-level interactive language for numerical computations [pdf]

Post by scottlocklin » Sat, Jan 19, 2019, 1:56 PM UTC

kxyvr wrote: post #4

sitkack wrote: post #2

What benefit does Octave have over the Python ecosystem? Esp as a clone of proprietary software? The only thing I can see is as a way of running Matlab codes in clusters on cloud w/o having to also run the license servers.

I work as an applied mathematician writing numerical codes and I prefer to prototype in MATLAB/Octave for a number of reasons: 1. I believe it to be far easier to debug an algorithm in MATLAB/Octave than Python. When I drop into the debugger, I can immediately check things like the eigenvalues of a matrix with a simple "eig(A)" or look at the sparsity visually with "spy(A)". Though this is possible in Python, I belie…

Post by sampo » Sat, Jan 19, 2019, 3:27 PM UTC

sitkack wrote: post #2

What benefit does Octave have over the Python ecosystem? Esp as a clone of proprietary software? The only thing I can see is as a way of running Matlab codes in clusters on cloud w/o having to also run the license servers.

    exp(-i*pi*[0 0.5 1])

    import cmath
    import numpy as np
    np.exp(-1j*cmath.pi*np.array([0, 0.5, 1]))

Post by SubiculumCode » Sat, Jan 19, 2019, 4:10 PM UTC

sampo wrote: post #38

wanderfowl wrote: post #7

As somebody in an academic field where many scripts exist for MATLAB (mostly digital signal processing focused), there are few projects I want to succeed more than Octave. It's very hard to recommend that students and colleagues grow invested in toolchains involving proprietary software that they may not reliably be able to afford/activate/use in the future, particularly when some students may end up working in devel…

> Here's hoping that someday, Octave does to MATLAB what R has done to SPSS and SAS. SPSS and SAS have horrible, horrible scripting languages. R is just ...slighly wonky. So as a language, R was a huge improvement on its alternatives. Whereas Octave is just a clone of the Matlab language, (almost) no improvement, just slower and less access to libraries.

Post by Q6T46nT668w6i3m » Sat, Jan 19, 2019, 4:15 PM UTC

cbkeller wrote: post #19

wanderfowl wrote: post #7

As somebody in an academic field where many scripts exist for MATLAB (mostly digital signal processing focused), there are few projects I want to succeed more than Octave. It's very hard to recommend that students and colleagues grow invested in toolchains involving proprietary software that they may not reliably be able to afford/activate/use in the future, particularly when some students may end up working in devel…

I've been porting over a bunch of my old academic Matlab to Julia. It's obviously nowhere as close to Matlab syntax as Octave is, but it's a lot closer than Python. YMMV of course, but there are enough similarities that a decent proportion of my code has worked after pretty easy find/replace changes like switching array indexing from parentheses to square brackets. And I usually end up with something that runs about…

Post by sampo » Sat, Jan 19, 2019, 4:22 PM UTC

SubiculumCode wrote: post #45

sampo wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Here's hoping that someday, Octave does to MATLAB what R has done to SPSS and SAS. SPSS and SAS have horrible, horrible scripting languages. R is just ...slighly wonky. So as a language, R was a huge improvement on its alternatives. Whereas Octave is just a clone of the Matlab language, (almost) no improvement, just slower and less access to libraries.

Its funny to me because for a lot of R users programming has very little to do with their use of R i.e. hypothesis testing using libraries like lme4 for mixed models.