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MATLAB is a bad choice for science. It is proprietary, making it difficult to share work among people who do not own a license, therefore making it more diffic
by thesnark 15y ago
MATLAB is a bad choice for science. It is proprietary, making it difficult to share work among people who do not own a license, therefore making it more difficult to reproduce results.
Not to mention the fact that the MATLAB language is extremely awkward anytime you want to work with something that isn't a matrix.
- dexen 15y agoGNU Octave [0] is mostly compatible with MATLAB. GPLed and implemented in Fortran and C++, it's pretty much hack-able to your needs. > MATLAB language is extremely awkward anytime you want to work with something that isn't a matrix. From my limited experience, that's true but rarely of relevance. You can, and want to, use matrix operations all the way. Less bugs (simplier code), faster execution. [0] http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/ http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/
- thesnark 15y agoIn my experience 90% of scientific data analysis work is: getting the data, cleaning it and transforming it into a form suitable for analysis. MATLAB fails miserably at these tasks.
- dexen 15y ago> 90% of scientific data analysis work is: (...) and transforming it into a form suitable for analysis. Is that infinite recursion or endless loop? Or is there an end to it, caused by quantum nature of work -- at some point the 90% becomes an undivisible unit? ;-) ((terribly sorry, couldn't help it)) At any rate, that sounds like you want to feed the input through a pipe of simple, programmable textual filters -- cue sed, awk etc. And then pipe into standard input of something -- I know Octave has standard input, MATLAB I wouldn't be so sure.