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Your point about Simulink is fair--even the Octave version, Xcos, doesn't provide much of an alternative for doing good controls simulations. And while I agree

by qchris 7y ago

Your point about Simulink is fair--even the Octave version, Xcos, doesn't provide much of an alternative for doing good controls simulations. And while I agree that the Julia's JIT is pretty slow to come up, if I'm doing a lot of linear algebra work, I've typically just left a dedicated terminal open for it. I also haven't had much of a real speed issue with using a REPL or notebook, unless the data sets are unreasonably large. I think I disagree with your take on Python's most common uses, as well as the implication that it is just now "coming into vogue." I'm by nobody's measure a Pythonista, but my experience has been that it gets pulled in almost anywhere it can, from scripting to app development to scientific computing. I am curious about your experience with signal processing, though--how have you seen MATLAB used where Python wasn't or couldn't? I haven't done much in that area since undergrad/internships, and there I would have said that LabView was much more prevalent as a tool, or even Labwindows. At least for many of the common functions like FFT, I don't recall MATLAB being any more common than any other language for that sort of thing (although as I said, my experience there might not be representative).

unlinked_dll 7y ago
I meant python coming into vogue for signal processing/controls, sorry if that was unclear. And that's mostly anecdotal. There's a lot of internal tooling around MATLAB that would take a lot of work to replace with Python. Like for example, I know a company that has a verilog compiler for their matlab models. That's not going to be rewritten for python. MATLAB toolchains are also easy to maintain, since they're so damn expensive and locked down. Compared to python, which... isn't always straightforward. And like I said before, MATLAB is just a fancy and expensive calculator. It's number crunch first, script second, and language third. Julia and python have a different balance, at least to me. If I'm doing something quick and dirty, reaching for MATLAB is the absolute fastest way for me to do it, and the easiest to record. With python that's not true at all. PS: I don't think I've ever seen someone use Labview to write and debug a DSP algorithm, so we've probably experienced totally different industries.

by qchris 7y ago

unlinked_dll 7y ago

I meant python coming into vogue for signal processing/controls, sorry if that was unclear. And that's mostly anecdotal. There's a lot of internal tooling around MATLAB that would take a lot of work to replace with Python. Like for example, I know a company that has a verilog compiler for their matlab models. That's not going to be rewritten for python. MATLAB toolchains are also easy to maintain, since they're so damn expensive and locked down. Compared to python, which... isn't always straightforward. And like I said before, MATLAB is just a fancy and expensive calculator. It's number crunch first, script second, and language third. Julia and python have a different balance, at least to me. If I'm doing something quick and dirty, reaching for MATLAB is the absolute fastest way for me to do it, and the easiest to record. With python that's not true at all. PS: I don't think I've ever seen someone use Labview to write and debug a DSP algorithm, so we've probably experienced totally different industries.