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A new release for GNU Octave

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Re: A new release for GNU Octave

#81

Post by fafner »

castratikron wrote: post #64

I'm hoping the next generation will move off of TI-8x calculators and into things like Octave for grade school use. There was a point in my education where I had mastered my trusty TI-83; I knew the purpose of every single function and how to use them. But then, I started running into problems in the real world that required more than 32 KB of memory to solve. When I moved to a laptop I had to relearn all of that kno…

I wish they'd rather use python or Julia. GNU Octave is great. But as a clone of Matlab it's constraint by compatibility and doomed to always be second* and at worst an enabler for Matlab. I'd rather break the dominance that Matlab has in many fields and replace it with free software.

* There are a few aspects where it is better. For example I believe the variable editor introduced one or two releases ago is nicer as it allows inline evaluation.

Re: A new release for GNU Octave

#82

Post by joe_biden123 »

WoodenChair wrote: post #75
kergonath wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I really dislike Matplotlib, so rendering is done in something else, usually gnuplot. I'm glad I'm not alone. I was starting to feel crazy—how can something with this bad an API (Matplotlib) be this popular in the Python ecosystem which is known for its lack of verbosity and clarity? How can it be integrated with every other package instead of some sane alternative? I tried Seaborn (a wrapper effectively), and it i…

seaborn is nice because it let's you do plots with one line that would take a page of code in basic matplotlib, but if you need to change one specific thing it might become really hard.

I honestly moved on to gui based plotting programs like grace or veusz, there's just a button for the things you want to do

Re: A new release for GNU Octave

#83

Post by pletnes »

kergonath wrote: post #54
Der_Einzige wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matplotlib is terrible (once you get to the point that you need to do non trivial things with it), that's why you use the excellent plotting library for python called "Bokeh"

Never really looked into it; I'll have a closer look. What do you think is its strengths?

Bokeh is also made to create embeddable, interactive plots for html/js. You can create quite sophisticated graphics with it from the backend alone. (We use it for web apps at $WORK)

Re: A new release for GNU Octave

#84

Post by Haemm0r »

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 from time to time. Octave performs very well to the point, where you have several encapsulated for-loops, where Matlab is several times faster in my experience.

Re: A new release for GNU Octave

#85

Post by marmaduke »

fafner wrote: post #81
castratikron wrote: post #64

I'm hoping the next generation will move off of TI-8x calculators and into things like Octave for grade school use. There was a point in my education where I had mastered my trusty TI-83; I knew the purpose of every single function and how to use them. But then, I started running into problems in the real world that required more than 32 KB of memory to solve. When I moved to a laptop I had to relearn all of that kno…

I wish they'd rather use python or Julia. GNU Octave is great. But as a clone of Matlab it's constraint by compatibility and doomed to always be second* and at worst an enabler for Matlab. I'd rather break the dominance that Matlab has in many fields and replace it with free software. * There are a few aspects where it is better. For example I believe the variable editor introduced one or two releases ago is nicer as…

> rather use python or Julia .. break the dominance that Matlab has in many fields and replace it with free software

I still think Octave has a niche to fill for students and HPC where software engineering (package management, compilation etc) is of insufficient concern.

Re: A new release for GNU Octave

#86

Post by bori5 »

mkl wrote: post #11
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'll say one option is bad :-) I don't use Octave, but I have a little in the past, and I have to teach students to use Matlab (2021 should be the last year of that before we switch to Python though), and I've done a lot of numerical and other programming in Python and Matlab, in each for ~20 years. In my opinion Matlab is a terribly designed language that has haphazardly grown features by accretion. Anything other t…

“ 20 years ago Matlab was pretty good, but it's barely changed since the “ How do you define “barely” looking at just changes from 2015 to 2020 in just core MATLAB shows at least the following changes.

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/release-notes.html?cat...

Re: A new release for GNU Octave

#87

Post by marmaduke »

billfruit wrote: post #51
paijiut wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use it often. Even after 20 years of using numeric/numarray/numpy, I still feel more productive in Octave and Matlab. Mostly time series analysis, signal processing, image analysis. Occasional modeling and simulation work. I think for me it’s that octave does it’s job well and doesn’t try to do other things. Python grates on me occasionally since it’s libraries seem to lack focus and try to be too much for too broa…

Matlab never feels a particularly elegant system to me, and most Matlab codebases I have seen are huge messes, with not much structuring and organization. In that respect I prefer python, that it naturally seems to lead to saner manner of organizing code, and also being very helpful in massaging/parsing/reformatting data into forms more amenable to processing.

> Matlab codebases I have seen are huge messes

I can confirm this, but, Conway's Law suggest that this reflects more the user group that the language. Matlab provides all the typical suspects for structuring codebases (packages, classes, functions, globals, etc) but look what users do with it. This suggests simply that research groups " communication structure"s are huge messes.

Re: A new release for GNU Octave

#88

Post by mkl »

leephillips wrote: post #43
mkl wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, there are many good alternatives. Seaborn, Plotly, and many more. I still use Matplotlib for most things (with the OO API), as I can control its fine details and it's more versatile. For non-graph visual things that I could use Matplotlib for, I've been generating SVGs and displaying them directly in Jupyter notebooks (with Cairo is one option, but just directly is pretty easy too).

You may have other reasons for preferring Matplotlib, but I don’t think anything allows more control over fine details or is more versitile than gnuplot.

I've never had much use for Gnuplot. It can do lots of things, but in my experience, it's been easier to get what I want in other tools. Most of my plots are created in Python programs, Latex documents, or interactive web pages, where I use tools focused on that purpose and embed the code where it fits. For most of my one-off explorations there are better tools too.

If I'm using Matplotlib, I'm almost always plotting things calculated in Python, so all my data and variables are right there ready to go. I think the fine details are controllable in more programmatic ways than Gnuplot. I use other Python libraries when they're a better fit. Being Python and object oriented makes it easy to figure out how to do many things (e.g. autocomplete).

If I'm doing one-off throwaway plots, there are better and easier tools than Gnuplot: Desmos, GeoGebra.

If I'm making interactive demos, there are better tools than Gnuplot: Desmos, GeoGebra, JSXGraph, Jupyter.

If I'm plotting a function for a high-quality PDF document, TikZ gives me more control than Gnuplot, and makes it easy to make many plots with consistent (and changeable) style, though being a Latex-based tool it has limitations to go with its power. TikZ is great for diagrams too. Asymptote is more powerful than TikZ in some ways for this kind of thing, but often harder to use.

Re: A new release for GNU Octave

#89

Post by gautamdivgi »

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 actually went the other way from Octave to scipy, numpy and matplotlib. This really long ago though - around 2007. As a programmer moving into quants needing to process huge amounts of data python/matplotlib seemed a much better fit for me. It also enabled me to run multiprocess number crunching on my 8-core desktop at home. Octave would be able to use just 1 core, I could code the python scripts to use all 8.

Octave was really good to prototype and enabled me to get somethings done really quick. But once I got to know the python libraries better it just seemed easier. I could do all my data processing and quants in a single language.

I'm sure much has changed and was actually quite sad when the original author of Octave (John Eaton) mentioned in 2017 that he was unable to maintain it.

I've lost touch on Octave over the years and genuinely pleased to see that it is still being actively maintained. I think its time for me to see what I've missed in the past 13 years.

Re: A new release for GNU Octave

#90

Post by thefunnyman »

nikanj wrote: post #77
castratikron wrote: post #64

I'm hoping the next generation will move off of TI-8x calculators and into things like Octave for grade school use. There was a point in my education where I had mastered my trusty TI-83; I knew the purpose of every single function and how to use them. But then, I started running into problems in the real world that required more than 32 KB of memory to solve. When I moved to a laptop I had to relearn all of that kno…

Not sure what kind of lobbying & campaign contributions have built the TI stronghold on the education market, but highschool kids today seem to use pretty much the same TI-85 that I had in the 1990s, except with a more colorful shell.

Was in high school in the 2010s and I had to buy a TI-84. They have a version with more storage and a color display but it’s still that same calculator all these years later.
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