Matlab licensing is prohibitive for everyone in a team to have one and WAN licences are 4x the cost of a seat, so we tend to have code capable of running in both octave and matlab in general. The model is all users can use octave for lower level / common code components and it works finw, and then the system level guys who really require matlab for its toolboxes can also use them and that common code also. If it was not for the advanced matlab toolboxes (and some key engineers who know only matlab) we'd probably have moved to python or Julia.l to get away from this two tier use model
A new release for GNU Octave
71–80 of 99 posts
Re: A new release for GNU Octave
#72I’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.
Here is my story. We used Matlab, but then the polling of the license server got more and more aggressive(or we were unlucky). Just when you want to work on the 8h flight the thing popping up and saying 'need to connect to the internet' is not fun. Now we had a volume license(I think). And it needs server access every 10 times you run a script. Try making software which wants to use the Ethernetport with something else, it is just annoying. So you pay a lot of money and get annoyed...
Octave is slower than Matlab (at least last time, no loop acceleration), and no GUI library. So we went straight to python.
Re: A new release for GNU Octave
#73I’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.
Signal processing, 15 years using Matlab/Octave and 10 years using Python. It's easier to prototyping signal processing algorithms in Matlab/Octave. Some important functions in Scipy perform much worse than Matlab/Octave.
Re: A new release for GNU Octave
#74I’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.
Here is my story. We used Matlab, but then the polling of the license server got more and more aggressive(or we were unlucky). Just when you want to work on the 8h flight the thing popping up and saying 'need to connect to the internet' is not fun. Now we had a volume license(I think). And it needs server access every 10 times you run a script. Try making software which wants to use the Ethernetport with something el…
> Octave is slower than Matlab (at least last time, no loop acceleration), and no GUI library. So we went straight to python.
But don't you find python slower? I prefer octave to python, in part, because the linear solvers are much faster (and the startup time, too).
Re: A new release for GNU Octave
#75I’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…
> 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 is way better for doing basic plots. But as soon as you get beyond that you're back in arcane Matplotlib territory. The best thing I could have done would have been to ignore its integrations and start with a better plotting API to begin with. The little bit of extra integration effort would have been worth avoiding Matplotlib. And there are several alternatives in the Python landscape.
No offense to the authors—it's clear they've done a lot of great work. But I think they got stuck with a bad API that they started with and it became so common-place that they were forced to continually be backwards compatible with something that really needed an overhaul.
Re: A new release for GNU Octave
#76I'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…
At least in the US, high school education still and probably will use TI calculators for the foreseeable future. They are a long existing standard and very practical for that environment. However, most AP classes do allow the use of the TI-Nspire which is a much more capable platform than the TI-8x series. And even in that series, the TI-84 and variants are much more popular now.
At the college level, at least for engineering programs, at my school there was a pretty big emphasis on doing a lot by hand besides trivial stuff like addition and multiplication. The extent that we would utilize calculators seemed very minimal. Most of the degree programs including teaching students one or more of Mathematica, matlab, octave, and R. But I would say it sounds like the depth you had for the TI-83 doesn't really exist in the modern education, rather it is a more broad use of multiple platforms.
Re: A new release for GNU Octave
#77I'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.
Re: A new release for GNU Octave
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Last time I tried a few years ago, Octave couldn't hold a candle to Matlab's plotting functions. It's a different league.
Interesting. My experience has been the exact opposite. The quality of matlab's plots paled compared to that of Octave's.
Didn't really notice any major difference in quality... I was talking ease-of-use and richness of options.
What quality differences do you refer to?
Re: A new release for GNU Octave
#79I’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.
As a student of Computational Physics, because we have more teachers using Octave than Python. However, its lack of support for Unicode variables and filenames is very frustrating in this day and age… (I understand that they are being stuck due to Matlab having poor support too.)
I believe Unicode support was improved in this (6.1) release
Re: A new release for GNU Octave
#80Earlier 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…
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"
could you give an example of an "non-trivial" thing you're talking about (i.e a few lines of code)? And how you solve it with "Bokeh"?
I agree that matplotlib's functional interface is somewhat messy, but that is somewhat historical, and stems from wanting to mimic how matlab works. I personally find matplotlib's OO interface both very powerful, and somewhat intuitive, once one gets a hang of it, hence I'm curious of specific cases where it fails for you.