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I think your perspective is too small. R is a DSL for data and statistics. Matlab is used in academia and industry across all engineering disciplines, where dat

by krapht 11y ago

I think your perspective is too small. R is a DSL for data and statistics. Matlab is used in academia and industry across all engineering disciplines, where data and statistics is but a small subset of its total capabilities. You will never be able to use R to model a Kalman filter, calculate stresses in a beam, or simulate engine control logic. I refer you to Matlab's toolbox list. http://www.mathworks.com/products/ http://www.mathworks.com/products/

Hansi 11y ago
Sorry you are wrong especially about your first example. For the other two yes there aren't built in toolboxes to handle those but it can be done. R has a lot of packages + it's a language so anyone can effectively write anything: https://cran.r-project.org/web/views/ https://cran.r-project.org/web/views/
- krapht 11y ago
  I can write anything to do any computation in any programming language. The whole point is that there are pre-existing, high quality libraries and toolboxes to do these operations. In fact, that is exactly why R is popular - it has excellent libraries for handling data and statistics. You're right. R does in fact have a library for modeling Kalman filters. My mistake! Let me pick any other example from the Matlab toolbox product list that R doesn't have! Can you model a radar system in R? Can you tune PID systems in R interactively? Don't be a pedant. Since you are familiar with R, you should know R is 95% used by data scientists and others involved in statistical work.
  - baldfat 11y ago
    This is a 404 Error http://www.mathworks.com/discovery/matlab-vs-python.html http://www.mathworks.com/discovery/matlab-vs-python.html This is an actual working link. http://www.mathworks.com/discovery/matlab-vs-r.html http://www.mathworks.com/discovery/matlab-vs-r.html And the lets see what is on Stack Overflow. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1738087/what-can-matlab-do-that-r-cannot-do http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1738087/what-can-matlab-d...
mikeskim 11y ago
You can do all of those things in R except maybe Simulink with a GUI (at least not yet, maybe soon?), and you have the choice of working with multiple implementations. https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/FKF/FKF.pdf https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/FKF/FKF.pdf https://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-devel/library/stats/html/KalmanLike.html https://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-devel/library/stats/html/Kal... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1738087/what-can-matlab-do-that-r-cannot-do http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1738087/what-can-matlab-d... Unless you are doing something very specific and require a specific toolbox only for Matlab, you're better off just using R (or Python).
- krapht 11y ago
  I can't disagree more with a blanket statement like that. I would never recommend Python / R to the physicists and scientists that I work with. They don't know how to program well. The code they put out is usually garbage, hard to read, and fragile. Software development is not something they do. Backing up for them is emailing themselves a .zip file of their work and revision control is saving their DocXs and PPTs with different dates in the filename. My point is, coding is not something they enjoy, or care about, it's just a means to an end. The environment and tooling around R/Python still cannot compare to Matlab in terms of ease of use, for the things that Mathworks (creators of Matlab) care enough about to write a toolbox or gui wizard for. The value is not in the language, or syntax, but in the libraries and tooling. I don't know a single Matlab user who doesn't make heavy use of the toolboxes Matlab sells. And this is why I believe Matlab is not going to go away. If being free and flexible was all that mattered, Linux would have arrived on the desktop already.
  - devonkim 11y ago
    After having worked with enough academicians, the code that I had to deal with was too agonizingly crufty for me to deal with that it made a huge influence over my decision to away from academia (and my subsequent drop in grades in school). I figured that if I had enough problems just dealing with the code, I couldn't imagine having to trudge through everything else that led up to that code. But it shattered my preconceived image of academicians being curious about everything and having a great deal of care and pride in the tooling they use - that I should look to them as reference rather than a bunch of people that dropped out of school for a quick buck, and that simply wasn't true whatsoever. Matlab is going to be the COBOL of academia without some major groundbreaking research that invalidates or supersedes a great deal of research code, and given the community-consensus nature of so much research done I can't imagine quite something so disruptive happening.

by krapht 11y ago

Hansi 11y ago

Sorry you are wrong especially about your first example. For the other two yes there aren't built in toolboxes to handle those but it can be done. R has a lot of packages + it's a language so anyone can effectively write anything: https://cran.r-project.org/web/views/ https://cran.r-project.org/web/views/

krapht 11y ago
I can write anything to do any computation in any programming language. The whole point is that there are pre-existing, high quality libraries and toolboxes to do these operations. In fact, that is exactly why R is popular - it has excellent libraries for handling data and statistics. You're right. R does in fact have a library for modeling Kalman filters. My mistake! Let me pick any other example from the Matlab toolbox product list that R doesn't have! Can you model a radar system in R? Can you tune PID systems in R interactively? Don't be a pedant. Since you are familiar with R, you should know R is 95% used by data scientists and others involved in statistical work.
- baldfat 11y ago
  This is a 404 Error http://www.mathworks.com/discovery/matlab-vs-python.html http://www.mathworks.com/discovery/matlab-vs-python.html This is an actual working link. http://www.mathworks.com/discovery/matlab-vs-r.html http://www.mathworks.com/discovery/matlab-vs-r.html And the lets see what is on Stack Overflow. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1738087/what-can-matlab-do-that-r-cannot-do http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1738087/what-can-matlab-d...

mikeskim 11y ago

You can do all of those things in R except maybe Simulink with a GUI (at least not yet, maybe soon?), and you have the choice of working with multiple implementations. https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/FKF/FKF.pdf https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/FKF/FKF.pdf https://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-devel/library/stats/html/KalmanLike.html https://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-devel/library/stats/html/Kal... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1738087/what-can-matlab-do-that-r-cannot-do http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1738087/what-can-matlab-d... Unless you are doing something very specific and require a specific toolbox only for Matlab, you're better off just using R (or Python).

krapht 11y ago
I can't disagree more with a blanket statement like that. I would never recommend Python / R to the physicists and scientists that I work with. They don't know how to program well. The code they put out is usually garbage, hard to read, and fragile. Software development is not something they do. Backing up for them is emailing themselves a .zip file of their work and revision control is saving their DocXs and PPTs with different dates in the filename. My point is, coding is not something they enjoy, or care about, it's just a means to an end. The environment and tooling around R/Python still cannot compare to Matlab in terms of ease of use, for the things that Mathworks (creators of Matlab) care enough about to write a toolbox or gui wizard for. The value is not in the language, or syntax, but in the libraries and tooling. I don't know a single Matlab user who doesn't make heavy use of the toolboxes Matlab sells. And this is why I believe Matlab is not going to go away. If being free and flexible was all that mattered, Linux would have arrived on the desktop already.
- devonkim 11y ago
  After having worked with enough academicians, the code that I had to deal with was too agonizingly crufty for me to deal with that it made a huge influence over my decision to away from academia (and my subsequent drop in grades in school). I figured that if I had enough problems just dealing with the code, I couldn't imagine having to trudge through everything else that led up to that code. But it shattered my preconceived image of academicians being curious about everything and having a great deal of care and pride in the tooling they use - that I should look to them as reference rather than a bunch of people that dropped out of school for a quick buck, and that simply wasn't true whatsoever. Matlab is going to be the COBOL of academia without some major groundbreaking research that invalidates or supersedes a great deal of research code, and given the community-consensus nature of so much research done I can't imagine quite something so disruptive happening.