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I feel this article is somewhat unbalanced in its single minded rejoice for a certain tool/environment. So in the same spirit here come a couple of reasons not
by maurits 16y ago
I feel this article is somewhat unbalanced in its single minded rejoice for a certain tool/environment. So in the same spirit here come a couple of reasons not to switch from Matlab to Python, all stemming from my experience when I decided to try to switch from Matlab to Python/C
- installing all these packages on (any) system is painful. Different versions don't play together or don't work (yet) on some platform and or architecture. This stems from my own experience of getting a version of python to work with numpy, scipy, matplotlib, opencv and PIL on a windows, mac, and linux machine. No 100 percent success yet on any platform.
- central and consistent documentation. Even for very simple cases, I got a bit of a headache. I encounter a python print statement for the first time that obviously differs somewhat from its c printf cousin. I google "python print syntax" only to find that the first xx hits, including the official documentation, do not cover the full specification of this statement. I fear the moment I might actually need detailed information on something less trivial.
- Numerical integration is more accurate in Matlab.
- Visualization capabilities of matlab are more powerful. But who knows, perhaps there is yet another package floating around :-)
- Matlab may not have advanced data-structures, but it is a rapid prototyping tool, for testing ideas. If I need to write an actual application, I will use a tool and language geared for that task.
- xiongchiamiov 16y ago> central and consistent documentation. Even for very simple cases, I got a bit of a headache. I encounter a python print statement for the first time that obviously differs somewhat from its c printf cousin. I google "python print syntax" only to find that the first xx hits, including the official documentation, do not cover the full specification of this statement. I fear the moment I might actually need detailed information on something less trivial. http://docs.python.org/reference/simple_stmts.html#the-print-statement http://docs.python.org/reference/simple_stmts.html#the-print... lists eveything about `print` - it takes stuff in, converts 'em to strings, and sticks in on stdout. It doesn't refer to prinf-like formatting because that's for strings in general. If you weren't aware of this, you probably should have been going through a basic Python tutorial, rather than just jumping into the middle of things. Python's documentation is the best I've encountered so far, and I find good docs to be an important value in the community, as well. I guess YMMV, though.
- hogu 16y agoinstall is painful - enthought python distribution does make it pretty painless, but its not free for non-academics agreed on documentation actually I think python's visualization capabilities are more powerful, have you looked at mlab? the 3d capabilities there are insane I use python because I can do rapid prototyping, and turn it into a full application with the same code base. did you ultimately go back to matlab?
- maurits 16y agoWell, I only got it all the work ( on OS X ) like an hour or two ago, and am currently happily learning&exploring. I wanted to venture beyond Matlab because for what I am currently doing the environment and language is to limited, yet I do not wish to prototype in C++. Python together with some libraries seemed to be a deal in heaven. I also thought it would function as a better stepping stone towards an actual application.
- tmarthal 16y agoInstallation of the PIL pre-built packages on OSX is notoriously difficult, since it relies on system c libraries to do some processing. Moving your development to a linux machine will clear up all of those issues. Also 'easy_install' should get you all of the packages you want.