51–60 of 104 posts
It's strange there're no single comment about Octave — http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/ It's free software and the language is 99% compatible with Matlab. Edit: and yes, Matlab is not intended for any generalisation/abstraction. It's a big scientific calculator with REPL. And complicated program in it still feels like big calculator
It's strange there're no single comment about Octave — http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/ It's free software and the language is 99% compatible with Matlab. Edit: and yes, Matlab is not intended for any generalisation/abstraction. It's a big scientific calculator with REPL. And complicated program in it still feels like big calculator
It's strange there're no single comment about Octave — http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/ It's free software and the language is 99% compatible with Matlab. Edit: and yes, Matlab is not intended for any generalisation/abstraction. It's a big scientific calculator with REPL. And complicated program in it still feels like big calculator
As someone who loves Matlab but would rather use a free-software solution, I must say that Octave is not an effective replacement for Matlab. Matlab itself is just so much more feature-complete and polished, turning to Octave feels like going back two decades in technology.
Matlab was my first real programming language. I guess the real "power" of Matlab is the collection of toolboxes (which carry a separate price tag for each) and the graphing capabilities and built-in vector functions that are easy to use. I think it was conveniently entrenched because it was the cheaper than Mathematica(?), I can't be too sure but there weren't many alternatives with a similar set of features.
Mathematica, on the other hand, is brilliant. It's a wonderful language with wonderful libraries and functionality, and it's quite clear how to write robust code in it.
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try python. it is much more powerful in almost every sense. And it is not easy to write crappy code in python.
Last I looked, vector and matrix handling was extremely clunky and tacked on in Python.
"Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran numerical program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of MATLAB/Octave/Scilab."
This could be called Gastón's corollary :-).
MATLAB, Octave and Scilab are like the UNIX shell but for matrices instead of text streams; this is they problem domain. If you can explain a problem with matrices and their operations, you can profit from MATLAB/Octave/Scilab. If you need more speed from your program, you should profile it and develop a mex-function in C or Fortran.
In academia and engineering most programs are developed to run at most thousands of times (The greatest problem that I find with MATLAB is that doesn't allow multiprocessing. In my last project, I ended developing several interpreters in Bison/Flex/C that ran concurrently in order to control a robot, but the main program was developed in MATLAB because it was simpler that way.
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We don't use simulink or anything like that - we just use the typical linear algebra stuff: Markov chains, finding eigenvalues, solving linear systems, etc.
try python. it is much more powerful in almost every sense. And it is not easy to write crappy code in python.
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> What makes you think it would be any better had they not used MATLAB? Probably the most general cross-disciplinary reason MATLAB worsens an already bad situation is that it isolates scientists and engineers from people who are good at programming. When you seek out help for a particular problem, it's often a blind-leading-the-blind situation. How can you learn to program well if you've never seen a good piece of MA…
Interesting point. From my own experience, though... I'm doubting you. I really don't think these people see a problem with what they're doing and wouldn't care even if they did - so why would they ask for help? You'd have to have someone sitting over their shoulder all the time training them (most colleges already have introductory MATLAB courses, so apparently that doesn't help much) - no one would like that arrang…
Yes, it is. Everybody that knows what they are doing moves away from MATLAB as fast as they can. That's MATLAB's fault.
Except for teaching, mind you. The entire problem is that MATLAB is a great teaching tool, and a completely worthless tool for anything else. Guess what, lots of people stick with what they learn at school.