4 ms·

Ask HN: Why has GNU Octave not succeeded over Matlab as GNU R did over S-Plus?

• unlikelymordant 9y ago
  I used a lot of matlab doing my phd in signal processing. The university i was at had licenses so i never worried about that. After graduating the need for a license is a bit of a pain point. I tried octave years ago and it was so much slower than matlab it was basically unusable. I heard it has sped up since then but i never tried it again. I mostly use python for that stuff now, though julia is something I would consider if i had to do it again. Matlab as a language is just really bad, if you are going to use something open source just use julia or python instead.
  • samfisher83 9y ago
    Matlab is good for math. I would agree its programming stuff isn't good, but if you are working the matrices Matlab is much easier to use.
  • jfaucett 9y ago
    "I tried octave years ago and it was so much slower" I tried the then current version of octave less than 3 months ago at the latest version and it was still slow to the point of being unusable. Even a lot of simple matlab code I tried wasn't even runnable it was so slow.