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Also a problem for Octave. Remember this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13603575 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13603575 It also stings a little

Also a problem for Octave. Remember this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13603575 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13603575 It also stings a little when people say that it's completely obsolete because Matlab itself is "legacy" and we should all be abandoning the language, Octave included... and yet, even though I like numpy and Python and matplotlib and Julia and R, I still find myself reaching for Octave whenever I need a quick visualisation of some data.

in9 9y ago
Really? Why is that? In my mind, it is tough to beat ggplot
- jordigh 9y ago
  Partly it's more familiarity with Octave than ggplot, but partly also that the Octave syntax is just about the easiest there is out there. Type something, immediately see some graphs. Type some more, gradually modify that graph. The simplicity is a big selling point. Julia's syntax comes pretty close, but I'm not as familiar with it yet. Remember that Matlab's and Octave's biggest audience consists of not-a-programmer programmers, that is, people who consider using Matlab or Octave as being something different than using a "real" programming language. I call them not-a-programmer because that's what I've often heard them call themselves, even as they write Matlab or Octave code.
- mattkrause 9y ago
  Matlab/octave also include everything but the kitchen sink, especially if you're on an academic license. You can certainly replicate this with a python stack, but it involves a fair number of external libraries.
maliker 9y ago
You might like matplotlib for visualization. It's a Python clone of Matlab's plotting tools. And it's compatible with numpy if you need to do linear algebra or operate on big datasets.
- cwyers 9y ago
  He mentions matplotlib by name.
jacobolus 9y ago
Octave’s “business model” is “give away for free an inferior clone of a commercial product”. Why is anyone surprised that that isn’t lucrative? Anyone who has the money to spend on Octave is likely to just pay for Matlab. The defining feature of Octave users is that they want to use Matlab’s library ecosystem but they’re too cheap or broke to pay for a copy of Matlab.
- jordigh 9y ago
  Because Matlab is expensive. Very expensive. Especially if you want to run it on servers or clusters, which is something people want to do. We're talking a single company paying millions of dollars per year for Matlab licenses, versus paying thousands for Octave (this does happen, and some companies do pay for Octave, but very few). My last job consisted in fixing Octave enough to be able to run some classifiers in servers, which would have been prohibitively expensive in Matlab and it would have also been much too expensive to rewrite in a different language. It was cheaper to pay me to fix Octave just enough for this code to run. As to the "inferior" part, it really depends. Some people really like the Octave-exclusive features, but most are unaware they even exist.
  - noobermin 9y ago
    What exclusive features are there? I'm interested.
    - jordigh 9y ago
      It's really nothing major, but it's the small little cherries on top: http://wiki.octave.org/FAQ#What_features_are_unique_to_Octave.3F http://wiki.octave.org/FAQ#What_features_are_unique_to_Octav... It's a bit of a problem to innovate too much with Octave, because Matlab may decide to implement a feature we did first, but they'll do it slightly differently, forcing us to redo our work to match theirs.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - 9y ago

in9 9y ago

Really? Why is that? In my mind, it is tough to beat ggplot

jordigh 9y ago
Partly it's more familiarity with Octave than ggplot, but partly also that the Octave syntax is just about the easiest there is out there. Type something, immediately see some graphs. Type some more, gradually modify that graph. The simplicity is a big selling point. Julia's syntax comes pretty close, but I'm not as familiar with it yet. Remember that Matlab's and Octave's biggest audience consists of not-a-programmer programmers, that is, people who consider using Matlab or Octave as being something different than using a "real" programming language. I call them not-a-programmer because that's what I've often heard them call themselves, even as they write Matlab or Octave code.
mattkrause 9y ago
Matlab/octave also include everything but the kitchen sink, especially if you're on an academic license. You can certainly replicate this with a python stack, but it involves a fair number of external libraries.

maliker 9y ago

You might like matplotlib for visualization. It's a Python clone of Matlab's plotting tools. And it's compatible with numpy if you need to do linear algebra or operate on big datasets.

cwyers 9y ago
He mentions matplotlib by name.

jacobolus 9y ago

Octave’s “business model” is “give away for free an inferior clone of a commercial product”. Why is anyone surprised that that isn’t lucrative? Anyone who has the money to spend on Octave is likely to just pay for Matlab. The defining feature of Octave users is that they want to use Matlab’s library ecosystem but they’re too cheap or broke to pay for a copy of Matlab.

jordigh 9y ago
Because Matlab is expensive. Very expensive. Especially if you want to run it on servers or clusters, which is something people want to do. We're talking a single company paying millions of dollars per year for Matlab licenses, versus paying thousands for Octave (this does happen, and some companies do pay for Octave, but very few). My last job consisted in fixing Octave enough to be able to run some classifiers in servers, which would have been prohibitively expensive in Matlab and it would have also been much too expensive to rewrite in a different language. It was cheaper to pay me to fix Octave just enough for this code to run. As to the "inferior" part, it really depends. Some people really like the Octave-exclusive features, but most are unaware they even exist.
- noobermin 9y ago
  What exclusive features are there? I'm interested.
  - jordigh 9y ago
    It's really nothing major, but it's the small little cherries on top: http://wiki.octave.org/FAQ#What_features_are_unique_to_Octave.3F http://wiki.octave.org/FAQ#What_features_are_unique_to_Octav... It's a bit of a problem to innovate too much with Octave, because Matlab may decide to implement a feature we did first, but they'll do it slightly differently, forcing us to redo our work to match theirs.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- 9y ago