Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A new release for GNU Octave

lwn.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 99 posts

Re: A new release for GNU Octave

#3

Post by sudosysgen »

rich_sasha wrote: post #2

I’m curious, are there any Octave users on HN? What are your use cases, in particular different to just an open-source Matlab-like clone? Why Octave not Python? I’m curious, not saying either option is bad.

I use it to do general linear algebra scripts and as a linalg calculator. The language is imo much nicer at this than python, and it also starts up way faster.

Also, symbolic calculation is a lot less cumbersome than in python!

Re: A new release for GNU Octave

#5

Post by tripa »

rich_sasha wrote: post #2

I’m curious, are there any Octave users on HN? What are your use cases, in particular different to just an open-source Matlab-like clone? Why Octave not Python? I’m curious, not saying either option is bad.

I drop to octave any time I need to do some one-off matrix computation. Also as an interface to GLPK.

Re: A new release for GNU Octave

#6

Post by ai_gandalf »

rich_sasha wrote: post #2

I’m curious, are there any Octave users on HN? What are your use cases, in particular different to just an open-source Matlab-like clone? Why Octave not Python? I’m curious, not saying either option is bad.

I was introduced to octave through Andrew Ng's Machine Learning course, its good..

Re: A new release for GNU Octave

#8

Post by abdullahkhalids »

rich_sasha wrote: post #2

I’m curious, are there any Octave users on HN? What are your use cases, in particular different to just an open-source Matlab-like clone? Why Octave not Python? I’m curious, not saying either option is bad.

I use Octave to quickly plot graphs or do quick non-trivial calculations during my lectures.

Better than python because I don't have to import libraries.

Re: A new release for GNU Octave

#9

Post by smallpipe »

rich_sasha wrote: post #2

I’m curious, are there any Octave users on HN? What are your use cases, in particular different to just an open-source Matlab-like clone? Why Octave not Python? I’m curious, not saying either option is bad.

I’ve used it to copy a matlab library into hobby software, whilst being able to debug it to compare.

Details in my previous comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25441585

Re: A new release for GNU Octave

#10

Post by kergonath »

rich_sasha wrote: post #2

I’m curious, are there any Octave users on HN? What are your use cases, in particular different to just an open-source Matlab-like clone? Why Octave not Python? I’m curious, not saying either option is bad.

I use Matlab-likes (actually Scilab rather than Octave) for one offs and interactive use. That’s usually playing with a dataset, test some analysis techniques, quick regressions, solving linear equations systems, this sort of things. I hate having to set up the whole machinery when doing this in Python. Also, the general-purpose nature of Python gets in the way, whereas the Matlab-like syntax is very focused and much less cumbersome. This does not matter much in a script, but is a pain for interactive use. On the other hand, Matlab is terrible to write scripts, with its inconsistencies and its almost-Fortran-but-weirder syntax.

Once the pipeline is set, Python is for scripts that need to be run more than about a dozen times, or need to be run on several datasets, or for things that need to be reproduced exactly (like stuff that goes into a paper). I also use it to prepare datasets from large numbers of calculations where the useful results need to be gathered from dozens/hundreds of files in a more or less complex file structure, often on different computers, with the occasional pass with some post-processing tools.

I really dislike Matplotlib, so rendering is done in something else, usually gnuplot.

That’s for my stuff (mostly atomic-scale modelling and quantum chemistry in materials science), it might be different for other use cases...

Post reply on HN