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I spent a few years writing software professionally, a large fraction of it in MATLAB (engineering tools development for gas turbine companies). With every pro

I spent a few years writing software professionally, a large fraction of it in MATLAB (engineering tools development for gas turbine companies). With every project I lost more respect for matlab, which is very slow, and clunkier than the marketing material would suggest (for instance, IPC. Or accidentally passing a large data set to a vectorized O(n^2) operation). And they charge you $20k/year for a single license! I still have some old personal code left in matlab, and I have been using octave a bit lately just to keep running it- I have to say I do appreciate octave. My biggest complaint is how slow plotting is, for instance, I have a method of characteristics supersonic nozzle design software based on the modified Sauer method and methodology of Zucrow and Hoffman, that runs in a couple seconds, but in octave it takes several minutes to plot no more than a couple hundred lines (no, just straight lines with two points). What gives?

kxyvr 8y ago
One thing that caught my eye was your $20k/year license fee for MATLAB. How many toolboxes did you purchase?! I maintain a commercial license for a single user and it's nowhere near that. I purchased a perpetual license originally: https://www.mathworks.com/pricing-licensing.html https://www.mathworks.com/pricing-licensing.html which is around $2k, but then pay a yearly maintenance fee to get upgrades, which is vastly less.
- farmerjoe_eatat 8y ago
  It is ~$20k if you get a floating license.
- 4thaccount 8y ago
  Toolboxes are in the $5k range (to me that is crazy), so if you get the database, optimization, and power systems toolbox with a license, you're not far from $20k. This is one reason why if I had to pick commercial software I would choose Mathematica as they put everything in core as part of the standard license and don't require toolboxes for something the default software should have.

kxyvr 8y ago

One thing that caught my eye was your $20k/year license fee for MATLAB. How many toolboxes did you purchase?! I maintain a commercial license for a single user and it's nowhere near that. I purchased a perpetual license originally: https://www.mathworks.com/pricing-licensing.html https://www.mathworks.com/pricing-licensing.html which is around $2k, but then pay a yearly maintenance fee to get upgrades, which is vastly less.

farmerjoe_eatat 8y ago
It is ~$20k if you get a floating license.
4thaccount 8y ago
Toolboxes are in the $5k range (to me that is crazy), so if you get the database, optimization, and power systems toolbox with a license, you're not far from $20k. This is one reason why if I had to pick commercial software I would choose Mathematica as they put everything in core as part of the standard license and don't require toolboxes for something the default software should have.