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Curiously, I have the opposite experience as yours between matlab and octave. I have used both, and I find matlab clunky and slow to start, while octave is ver

Curiously, I have the opposite experience as yours between matlab and octave. I have used both, and I find matlab clunky and slow to start, while octave is very lean and responsive. My way of using them is probably not very representative though. I never do plotting, it's mostly saving the computed solutions into files and looking at them with other programs. In the rare cases I need to plot something, I write the data into a file and call gnuplot separately. Also, I do not run the interactive interpreter, but I write scripts that launch a new interpreter for each run. Matlab seems to be extremely ill-suited for this usage. For example, it takes about 3 seconds just for launching (!). Also, there are bizarre problems (apart from ridiculous memory usage), when running several matlab instances in parallel.

ptero 6y ago
Agree completely -- MATLAB is slow to start and is a memory hog. The language itself is horrible (which is why I prefer to use another language for complex back-end computation). Libraries for reading and writing formatted data are a joke (try reading a large XML or JSON file; or even a large CSV file with a mix of numeric and string fields); etc., etc. But it is just so good for visualization that I am willing to suffer its other problems. For example, try the below and zoom in / out / resize in both MATLAB and Octave: n = 2000000; x = rand(1, n); y = rand(1, n); plot(x, y, '.')
- AlotOfReading 6y ago
  If your primary concern is only the quality of visualizations and not language or libraries, I'm curious why you'd choose MATLAB over something like Mathematica. I've always found the latter to produce far prettier plots (with far less effort).
  - ptero 6y ago
    I gave a more involved example in a sibling comment, but I need fast, interactive plotting for large datasets; not necessarily the prettiest. And as another user mentioned, MATLAB currently has a lock on fast scientific plotting. It really is in a league of its own for now.
cambalache 6y ago
This was true even 10-15 years ago. Matlab is great but it is a behemoth. It's like comparing Unreal/Unity with Godot.

ptero 6y ago

Agree completely -- MATLAB is slow to start and is a memory hog. The language itself is horrible (which is why I prefer to use another language for complex back-end computation). Libraries for reading and writing formatted data are a joke (try reading a large XML or JSON file; or even a large CSV file with a mix of numeric and string fields); etc., etc. But it is just so good for visualization that I am willing to suffer its other problems. For example, try the below and zoom in / out / resize in both MATLAB and Octave: n = 2000000; x = rand(1, n); y = rand(1, n); plot(x, y, '.')

AlotOfReading 6y ago
If your primary concern is only the quality of visualizations and not language or libraries, I'm curious why you'd choose MATLAB over something like Mathematica. I've always found the latter to produce far prettier plots (with far less effort).
- ptero 6y ago
  I gave a more involved example in a sibling comment, but I need fast, interactive plotting for large datasets; not necessarily the prettiest. And as another user mentioned, MATLAB currently has a lock on fast scientific plotting. It really is in a league of its own for now.

cambalache 6y ago

This was true even 10-15 years ago. Matlab is great but it is a behemoth. It's like comparing Unreal/Unity with Godot.