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Ask HN: Can GNU Octave be used as full MATLAB replacement?
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've seen people use Octave in their workstations but I never worked where Octave code was used in "production". It was more of a individual prototyping/exploration tool for those who knew it.
Ask HN: Can GNU Octave be used as full MATLAB replacement?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've seen people use Octave in their workstations but I never worked where Octave code was used in "production". It was more of a individual prototyping/exploration tool for those who knew it.
I have Octave code running in production.
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.)
It doesn't need to be flashy. Just a nice font, a header, centre justification, some spacing, a paragraph explaining what the thing is, a nice logo, maybe some screenshots or a link to the docs and a download link.
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…
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…
For quick and dirty scientific PoC or obtaining ground truth, Octave/MATLAB is much better since it handles all the quirks of numerical programming with generally slow but with proven solutions.
During development phase of my Ph.D., my professor would scribble something in MATLAB and send it to me with a note "for the given inputs, you should obtain this and that. Attached is the crude math". It was up to me to clean the math, convert it to C++ and make it blazingly fast while solving any attached small but hard problems.
I still have a MATLAB license to test these ground truth scripts against my code.
What value can Octave give me, relative to python?
If you're in a Mathematical Research or Engineering context then you will likely have some models or systems that someone else has written in MATLAB.
If you're writing your own code and you have freedom over your environment then you should pick the best language for your use case.
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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.