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I really liked Octave and used it for a lot of prototyping - it was certainly sufficient for my needs and the maintainers are helpful & friendly and were unoffi
by deepnet 10y ago
I really liked Octave and used it for a lot of prototyping - it was certainly sufficient for my needs and the maintainers are helpful & friendly and were unofficial TA's during the 1st run of Professor Ng's Coursera course.
Given the range of finances of a MOOC class of 160,000, Octave's price (free) was vital for some to participate.
Matlab looks really cool, but I feel it unfair to advocate un-Free software if my students can't take it home. I never got a chance to play with Matlab so can't really comment.
As you suggest I graduated from Octave to Python, sometimes Lua & Torch7 and then the subsets of C for CUDA & OPENCL's GPU parallelism.
Javascript is so universal accessible a platform that I like to give demonstrations using Karpathy's ConvnetJS & ReinforceJS as everyone can explore it straight away using the browser console as REPL.
Professor Ng's MOOC students managed a good fundraiser for Octave development so those that could, paid something.
- tacos 10y agoIf exploring neural nets in a REPL is the spark that finally lights a fire under Octave, I'm all for it! But I think they already lost the battle to Python. > Matlab looks really cool, but I feel it unfair to advocate un-Free software if my students can't take it home. Why is it your job to advocate anything? Inform them of what's available. Challenge yourself to make your lessons applicable to a broader range of tools, including ones your students might craft themselves. Let them know they can get the job done with GIMP but there's Photoshop at $9.99/month that might save them time and make them more employable. $1999 MacBook, $649 phone, but somehow $99 for a critical piece of software is unacceptable. And people wonder why students have debt but can't find jobs.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]