Matlab is oversold as a general-purpose language • Hacker News Board

Re: Matlab is oversold as a general-purpose language

#101

Post by kyzyl » Sun, Jul 28, 2013, 1:47 AM UTC

raverbashing wrote: post #85

kazagistar wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean like this? http://docs.scipy.org/doc/numpy/reference/routines.linalg.ht...

Yes, as I said, it's getting better. Simulink is a whole different world inside Matlab as well Here's something that doesn't look like it's covered by NumPy 100% http://www.mathworks.de/de/help/signal/ug/iir-filter-design....

> Here's something

Yeah that's exactly the kind of stuff I meant when I was talking about pulse coding and such. Although the last time I had to do some filtering stuff I did manage to use python+scipy, but yeah it hasn't progressed as far as matlab in a lot of those niche engineering areas yet.

Re: Matlab is oversold as a general-purpose language

#102

Post by chunky1994 » Sun, Jul 28, 2013, 3:46 AM UTC

kyzyl wrote: post #100

chunky1994 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. I couldn't agree more. WHile I've had only a brief stint with MATLAB at an internship, the code was possibly the ugliest thing I'd ever seen. Given that I'm a physics major and will probably be encountering matlab quite frequently, I sure hope that it won't be so horribly documented, and just so unreadable. I was so offended, I had to rewrite over 2000 lines of code in python, and on completion, the python code…

> Given that I'm a physics major and will probably be encountering matlab quite frequently, I sure hope that it won't be so horribly documented, and just so unreadable. Coming from another physics major... don't get your hopes up. Just do your thing and hope that others follow suit. > I was so offended, I had to rewrite over 2000 lines of code in python, and on completion, the python code was a little of 700 lines, c…

Oh I see!

If you've been through the same thing, I would definitely want to be able to contact you in case you have any advice on such matters.

Could I request you to provide me some way of remaining in touch with you?

Thank you!

Re: Matlab is oversold as a general-purpose language

#103

Post by kyzyl » Sun, Jul 28, 2013, 8:32 AM UTC

chunky1994 wrote: post #102

kyzyl wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Given that I'm a physics major and will probably be encountering matlab quite frequently, I sure hope that it won't be so horribly documented, and just so unreadable. Coming from another physics major... don't get your hopes up. Just do your thing and hope that others follow suit. > I was so offended, I had to rewrite over 2000 lines of code in python, and on completion, the python code was a little of 700 lines, c…

Oh I see! If you've been through the same thing, I would definitely want to be able to contact you in case you have any advice on such matters. Could I request you to provide me some way of remaining in touch with you? Thank you!

kyzyl [standard delimiter] kyzyl [standard delimiter] ca

Re: Matlab is oversold as a general-purpose language

#104

Post by skierscott » Sun, Jul 28, 2013, 3:06 PM UTC

Matlab is useful for it's special use case -- for mathematical applications (signal processing, medical imaging, etc). It has good tools to speed up the code too: parfor and the like.

But the cost gets to me. It inhibits collaboration, and costs a ton for non-academics. From scientific computing[1]:

> $1,900 for the commercial Matlab; $2,800 for Simulink; and typically $800 for each toolbox.

The whole Matlab suite doesn't sit well with me, so I'm most likely a Pythonista. The speed of Numpy/Scipy is comparable, and the quality of the Matplotlib plots wonderful. In fact, I've done a speed comparison[2] between between Python and Matlab. I would have optimized more in Matlab, but didn't have access to the Optimization toolbox.

[1]:http://www.scientific-computing.com/review1.html [2]:http://nbviewer.ipython.org/urls/raw.github.com/scottsievert...