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I used Octave both times I took Andrew Ng’s Stanford Machine Learning class. Initially I hated the language but grew to like it. Octave is an amazing open sou

• rightbyte 4y ago
  > Initially I hated the language but grew to like it. Ye in the end I started to like it too. I mean, as long as you don't try to do string manipulations and mainly do numerical stuff it is a very nice language all the quirks be damned.
• zelphirkalt 4y ago
  I also started doing that MOOC, when it was hyped. I got to the first Octave exercises. Immediately I felt uncomfortable with the code base presented. It seemed really badly structured. It felt like I was just hacking something into a mess. I knew I was side-tracking, but still I tried to refactor it a bit, to make it more acceptable. Modularization felt somehow shoehorned into the language though. Then the grader did not work any longer. Not sure it was because of my "refactoring" or because of the course platform. More likely my modifications, or that the grader checks the integrity of files one is not supposed to change. After that experience I threw the course and did 2 other MOOCs, which taught with the up-to-date (back then) Python stack, which I found much more useful for real applications. However, in those 2 MOOCs I could already use the knowledge learned from the Andrew Ng MOOC, so at least in that aspect of teaching the actual theory, he did a very good job.