GNU Octave: A high-level interactive language for numerical computations [pdf]

Post by GlenTheMachine » Sat, Jan 19, 2019, 3:30 AM UTC

kxyvr wrote: post #8

GlenTheMachine wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a well thought out argument and I appreciate it. I also use MATLAB/Octave quite a bit for numerical algorithm prototyping, and mostly hate it. The language has a shallow learning curve, true, but for complex software it gets ugly very fast. It’s just not a well designed language, and if you have any CS background that becomes very limiting. The thing that MATLAB brings to the table is the incredibly high quali…

For sure and I agree with many of the difficulties associated with MATLAB/Octave. When I want to put together a more complete piece of software that does things like: have a GUI, interact with a database, network conductivity, or parse files, I think that MATLAB/Octave is a poor choice. A language like Julia tries to bridge that gap. My problem with Julia is that we don't get license coverage for things like SuiteSpa…

Post by justwalt » Sat, Jan 19, 2019, 4:02 AM UTC

kxyvr wrote: post #4

sitkack wrote: post #2

What benefit does Octave have over the Python ecosystem? Esp as a clone of proprietary software? The only thing I can see is as a way of running Matlab codes in clusters on cloud w/o having to also run the license servers.

I work as an applied mathematician writing numerical codes and I prefer to prototype in MATLAB/Octave for a number of reasons: 1. I believe it to be far easier to debug an algorithm in MATLAB/Octave than Python. When I drop into the debugger, I can immediately check things like the eigenvalues of a matrix with a simple "eig(A)" or look at the sparsity visually with "spy(A)". Though this is possible in Python, I belie…

Post by kxyvr » Sat, Jan 19, 2019, 5:01 AM UTC

farmerjoe_eatat wrote: post #14

I spent a few years writing software professionally, a large fraction of it in MATLAB (engineering tools development for gas turbine companies). With every project I lost more respect for matlab, which is very slow, and clunkier than the marketing material would suggest (for instance, IPC. Or accidentally passing a large data set to a vectorized O(n^2) operation). And they charge you $20k/year for a single license! I…

Post by chrispeel » Sat, Jan 19, 2019, 6:23 AM UTC

wanderfowl wrote: post #7

As somebody in an academic field where many scripts exist for MATLAB (mostly digital signal processing focused), there are few projects I want to succeed more than Octave. It's very hard to recommend that students and colleagues grow invested in toolchains involving proprietary software that they may not reliably be able to afford/activate/use in the future, particularly when some students may end up working in devel…

Post by cbkeller » Sat, Jan 19, 2019, 7:44 AM UTC

wanderfowl wrote: post #7

As somebody in an academic field where many scripts exist for MATLAB (mostly digital signal processing focused), there are few projects I want to succeed more than Octave. It's very hard to recommend that students and colleagues grow invested in toolchains involving proprietary software that they may not reliably be able to afford/activate/use in the future, particularly when some students may end up working in devel…