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I am unfortunately forced to use Mathematica because my scientific collaborators do so. While I have become very proficient at it, I don't like the interface or

I am unfortunately forced to use Mathematica because my scientific collaborators do so. While I have become very proficient at it, I don't like the interface or the language very much. Its a functional language put into an interface suitable for iterative programming. Loading external libraries is very non-intuitive, and just being able to separate a single program over many files that you can simultaneously edit is hard. I am looking forward to the day I can switch to Sage and return to coding in emacs.

noobermin 8y ago
I got my PhD in computational plasma physics in a group that heavily used matlab. I'm lucky enough that my advisor was okay with me using numpy and friends instead as long as my plots and figures looked okay. Today, I run a one-man show for my post-doc doing simulations for an experimental group, so I thankfully get to continue this mode of work. And thank god I didn't have to face losing the ability to run my scripts after leaving the university (this happened to a couple of fellow graduates I know!) and today, when I want to run something on the supercomputer, I just run it; I don't have to worry about how many licenses are still on the license server or whatever the fuck. I get how Matlab is a thing and people like it, but potentially having analysis delayed because of lack of licenses seems somewhere between primitive and barbaric in 2018.
- 3rdAccount 8y ago
  I used Matlab in undergrad and Python a lot in industry. I got a Mathematica license recently being impressed with the documentation and the sheer breadth of stuff built into the language in a consistent manner. I ran into an issue when I found out that my license could only have 4 kernels activated at a time. I was able to close out the old sessions with the task manager, but I almost (exaggeration) punched my computer when the message popped up about licensing. Wtf? How much did I pay for this? Maybe I'll just stick with Python & Julia for what I need. I just traded one frustration for another.
- a-dub 8y ago
  Fair, but it would be really interesting to pit an avid MATLAB person against an avid numerical Python person in a data analysis race. I've found that you can generally do most things you can do with MATLAB in Python, but the experience in MATLAB is buttery smooth while the experience with numerical Python is clunky and obnoxious (whether it be all the useless textual noise in the code itself, the inferior quality of the plotting and visualization capabilities or the fact the Python scientific computing library ecosystem is so disjoint (this thing can handle pandas frames, this other thing needs numpy vectors, this other thing expects Python lists, whatever). I had high hopes for Julia, I have a test for it. How annoying is it to plot(sin(0:0.01:6*pi)) out of the box? For the extreme challenge question, how annoying is it to also open a new plot window and plot(cos(0:0.01:6:pi)) alongside it. I want to be able to pan around and inspect these complicated functions. So far, it has not yet passed the qualifiers.
  - ChrisRackauckas 8y ago
    >I had high hopes for Julia, I have a test for it. How annoying is it to plot(sin(0:0.01:6*pi)) out of the box? For the extreme challenge question, how annoying is it to also open a new plot window and plot(cos(0:0.01:6:pi)) alongside it. I want to be able to pan around and inspect these complicated functions. Just use the plot command in Makie.jl? This is a nice first few commands to check the install.
    - a-dub 8y ago
      In 0.6, I tried Plots.jl. It seemed pretty nice, but then if I tried to do a whos() to see what variables were in the workspace, it would go out to lunch for >20s. Not just the first time, every time I simply wanted to see what I had in RAM. This didn't seem very useful to me for interactive use. In 1.0, I tried Plots.jl again. I tried adding it using the package manager and it blew up trying to build. This is with no special state from me, I unpacked the 1.0.0 release, started it and did Pkg.add('Plots')... boom. There's such a great story around it and I really want to like it, but this is like extremely basic suitably to task stuff... Who knows, maybe I'm using it wrong.

noobermin 8y ago

I got my PhD in computational plasma physics in a group that heavily used matlab. I'm lucky enough that my advisor was okay with me using numpy and friends instead as long as my plots and figures looked okay. Today, I run a one-man show for my post-doc doing simulations for an experimental group, so I thankfully get to continue this mode of work. And thank god I didn't have to face losing the ability to run my scripts after leaving the university (this happened to a couple of fellow graduates I know!) and today, when I want to run something on the supercomputer, I just run it; I don't have to worry about how many licenses are still on the license server or whatever the fuck. I get how Matlab is a thing and people like it, but potentially having analysis delayed because of lack of licenses seems somewhere between primitive and barbaric in 2018.

3rdAccount 8y ago
I used Matlab in undergrad and Python a lot in industry. I got a Mathematica license recently being impressed with the documentation and the sheer breadth of stuff built into the language in a consistent manner. I ran into an issue when I found out that my license could only have 4 kernels activated at a time. I was able to close out the old sessions with the task manager, but I almost (exaggeration) punched my computer when the message popped up about licensing. Wtf? How much did I pay for this? Maybe I'll just stick with Python & Julia for what I need. I just traded one frustration for another.
a-dub 8y ago
Fair, but it would be really interesting to pit an avid MATLAB person against an avid numerical Python person in a data analysis race. I've found that you can generally do most things you can do with MATLAB in Python, but the experience in MATLAB is buttery smooth while the experience with numerical Python is clunky and obnoxious (whether it be all the useless textual noise in the code itself, the inferior quality of the plotting and visualization capabilities or the fact the Python scientific computing library ecosystem is so disjoint (this thing can handle pandas frames, this other thing needs numpy vectors, this other thing expects Python lists, whatever). I had high hopes for Julia, I have a test for it. How annoying is it to plot(sin(0:0.01:6*pi)) out of the box? For the extreme challenge question, how annoying is it to also open a new plot window and plot(cos(0:0.01:6:pi)) alongside it. I want to be able to pan around and inspect these complicated functions. So far, it has not yet passed the qualifiers.
- ChrisRackauckas 8y ago
  >I had high hopes for Julia, I have a test for it. How annoying is it to plot(sin(0:0.01:6*pi)) out of the box? For the extreme challenge question, how annoying is it to also open a new plot window and plot(cos(0:0.01:6:pi)) alongside it. I want to be able to pan around and inspect these complicated functions. Just use the plot command in Makie.jl? This is a nice first few commands to check the install.
  - a-dub 8y ago
    In 0.6, I tried Plots.jl. It seemed pretty nice, but then if I tried to do a whos() to see what variables were in the workspace, it would go out to lunch for >20s. Not just the first time, every time I simply wanted to see what I had in RAM. This didn't seem very useful to me for interactive use. In 1.0, I tried Plots.jl again. I tried adding it using the package manager and it blew up trying to build. This is with no special state from me, I unpacked the 1.0.0 release, started it and did Pkg.add('Plots')... boom. There's such a great story around it and I really want to like it, but this is like extremely basic suitably to task stuff... Who knows, maybe I'm using it wrong.