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As an electrical engineer (focusing on signal processing), Matlab appears to me to be the overwhelmingly dominant tool in my discipline for prototyping algorith

As an electrical engineer (focusing on signal processing), Matlab appears to me to be the overwhelmingly dominant tool in my discipline for prototyping algorithms and performing analyses. Recently, though, there has been a resurgence of interest in Python (with SciPy, NumPy, and Jupyter). I'm not sure if it outstrips IDL in popularity yet, let alone Matlab. For me, personally, I use Octave at home when prototyping algorithms because I'm cheap and haven't paid the ~$1k for a Matlab license. In my experience for real-time implementation, neither Matlab nor Python are considered efficient enough, even after using something like the Matlab compiler or Python's psyco or equivalent. Again, in my experience, C is by far the most popular choice. With regard to learning Octave and/or Matlab, I'd say people learn it because of inertia and that they're well-tuned for numerical analyses. I say this even though Python's my favorite general-purpose language. I still prefer Matlab/Octave over it for crunching data because, to me, they seem better designed for that purpose.

mthirsch 10y ago
> For me, personally, I use Octave at home when prototyping algorithms because I'm cheap and haven't paid the ~$1k for a Matlab license. FWIW, you can get a home copy of MATLAB for $149: https://www.mathworks.com/products/matlab-home/ https://www.mathworks.com/products/matlab-home/ > In my experience for real-time implementation, neither Matlab nor Python are considered efficient enough, even after using something like the Matlab compiler or Python's psyco or equivalent. Again, in my experience, C is by far the most popular choice. MATLAB Compiler won't make code any faster - it's still just running MATLAB engine underneath the hood. MATLAB Coder converts to C code optimized for real-time systems
- derstander 10y ago
  > FWIW, you can get a home copy of MATLAB for $149: https://www.mathworks.com/products/matlab-home/ https://www.mathworks.com/products/matlab-home/ Whoa, thanks for that link. IIRC quite awhile ago there was a student edition that wasn't really suitable for anything other than toy problems because there was a limitation in the size of matrices. This looks to be the real deal though! > MATLAB Compiler won't make code any faster - it's still just running MATLAB engine underneath the hood. MATLAB Coder converts to C code optimized for real-time systems My mistake: the particular toolboxes often fuse together in my head. Not such a big deal at work where we've got access to so many of them. It'd definitely be a pain if I didn't. My point still stands, though, that I haven't seen anyone on any of the projects I've worked on using MATLAB code that's been automatically converted to C. Or, at the very least, it's not part of any documented process that I've seen.

mthirsch 10y ago

> For me, personally, I use Octave at home when prototyping algorithms because I'm cheap and haven't paid the ~$1k for a Matlab license. FWIW, you can get a home copy of MATLAB for $149: https://www.mathworks.com/products/matlab-home/ https://www.mathworks.com/products/matlab-home/ > In my experience for real-time implementation, neither Matlab nor Python are considered efficient enough, even after using something like the Matlab compiler or Python's psyco or equivalent. Again, in my experience, C is by far the most popular choice. MATLAB Compiler won't make code any faster - it's still just running MATLAB engine underneath the hood. MATLAB Coder converts to C code optimized for real-time systems

derstander 10y ago
> FWIW, you can get a home copy of MATLAB for $149: https://www.mathworks.com/products/matlab-home/ https://www.mathworks.com/products/matlab-home/ Whoa, thanks for that link. IIRC quite awhile ago there was a student edition that wasn't really suitable for anything other than toy problems because there was a limitation in the size of matrices. This looks to be the real deal though! > MATLAB Compiler won't make code any faster - it's still just running MATLAB engine underneath the hood. MATLAB Coder converts to C code optimized for real-time systems My mistake: the particular toolboxes often fuse together in my head. Not such a big deal at work where we've got access to so many of them. It'd definitely be a pain if I didn't. My point still stands, though, that I haven't seen anyone on any of the projects I've worked on using MATLAB code that's been automatically converted to C. Or, at the very least, it's not part of any documented process that I've seen.