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GNU Octave 6.1.0

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Re: GNU Octave 6.1.0

#11

Post by GavinAnderegg »

chriszhang wrote: post #3

When I left university and did not have access to MATLAB anymore, I spent many a nights hacking away at GNU Octave. I have fond memories of Octave. I thought Octave will be a valuable skill when I enter the industry but I could not have been more wrong. Does anyone still use Octave? Is it worth learning? What tools or languages would you recommend as alternatives to someone graduating from university today?

I can only speak from a data science perspective, but a lot of folks I know needed to move from MATLAB/SAS/SPSS to R (using RStudio) and Python (often with Jupyter Notebooks) once they got into the field. Might just be the circles I run in, though.

I personally recommend Python (using NumPy, SciPy, MatPlotLib/Seaborn, Pandas, Keras/PyTorch, Gensim, etc). There’s a lot more that you’ll need to bolt together yourself, but there are packages for pretty much anything you’ll likely need to do in terms of math/science/analysis/ML.

That’s not to say that you shouldn’t advocate for Octave, though! I haven’t used it other than to poke around, but it seems like a great package.

Re: GNU Octave 6.1.0

#13

Post by jp0d »

Is it worth learning Octave/Matlab for ML or Data analysis work? Does anyone use it outside the engineering/scientific research community? Since Andrew Ng teaches his ML course in it, I'm curious. However, I'm wondering if learning Julia or R will be better for my career. I mostly use Python/SQL at work as a data analyst.

Re: GNU Octave 6.1.0

#14

Post by MaxBarraclough »

I know it's not really the point here, but it's nice to see a GNU project with a decent home-page. It's clear, presentable, and modern. (And of course it's not a JavaScript horror-show, but we'd never see that from a GNU project.)

Re: GNU Octave 6.1.0

#15

Post by galangalalgol »

GavinAnderegg wrote: post #11
chriszhang wrote: post #3

When I left university and did not have access to MATLAB anymore, I spent many a nights hacking away at GNU Octave. I have fond memories of Octave. I thought Octave will be a valuable skill when I enter the industry but I could not have been more wrong. Does anyone still use Octave? Is it worth learning? What tools or languages would you recommend as alternatives to someone graduating from university today?

I can only speak from a data science perspective, but a lot of folks I know needed to move from MATLAB/SAS/SPSS to R (using RStudio) and Python (often with Jupyter Notebooks) once they got into the field. Might just be the circles I run in, though. I personally recommend Python (using NumPy, SciPy, MatPlotLib/Seaborn, Pandas, Keras/PyTorch, Gensim, etc). There’s a lot more that you’ll need to bolt together yourself,…

Do any of them use julia in jupyter? I like the syntax and speed much better than numpy. The ffi from numpy into its native implementation is a high overhead.

Re: GNU Octave 6.1.0

#16

Post by tuix »

Currently you either have MATLAB+Toolboxes or Octave+Packages. I always wondered whether there could be a project to create open source toolboxes that would run in MATLAB. That means no effort is needed to maintain the core language features of MATLAB (of course you would need to buy the basic MATLAB licence without the Toolboxes) in that project and all the energy is spent on developing open-source toolbox replacements (which are typically way more expensive than basic MATLAB licence).

Re: GNU Octave 6.1.0

#17

Post by stabbles »

jp0d wrote: post #13

Is it worth learning Octave/Matlab for ML or Data analysis work? Does anyone use it outside the engineering/scientific research community? Since Andrew Ng teaches his ML course in it, I'm curious. However, I'm wondering if learning Julia or R will be better for my career. I mostly use Python/SQL at work as a data analyst.

In terms of current job openings probably R is best. Julia got its first stable release in August 2018, meaning that more companies could be adopting it now, but R has been around since 1995. If you like Python, Julia is probably easy to pick up though. Octave is incredibly slow and no competition for Matlab, Matlab is terrible as a programming language if you're used to Python, so it's likely you wouldn't enjoy your job if it involved Matlab.

Re: GNU Octave 6.1.0

#19

Post by woodson »

jp0d wrote: post #13

Is it worth learning Octave/Matlab for ML or Data analysis work? Does anyone use it outside the engineering/scientific research community? Since Andrew Ng teaches his ML course in it, I'm curious. However, I'm wondering if learning Julia or R will be better for my career. I mostly use Python/SQL at work as a data analyst.

In general, no, especially for typical data analysis tasks. MATLAB used to have an edge in signal processing, but (IMHO) lost it to Python-based solutions (especially when running things on GPUs, ML or not). If you're doing a lot of exploratory data analysis and statistics, R is worth a look.

Re: GNU Octave 6.1.0

#20

Post by mxcrossb »

wallwart wrote: post #4

I've always preferred MATLAB to Python as the more engineer-friendly programming language. The interface was a plus as well. That being said, given the sheer amount of scientific libraries for Python and universities moving towards it as well, I'm wondering if the effort to maintain Octave is worth it. One use for it could definitely be running older MATLAB scripts that have deprecated language features. Those were a…

There is still a lot of mathematics that there are matlab scripts for, and not python. I think it depends on how deep you dive into a particular area of course. But I think it’s definitely worth it.
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