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I would leave MATLAB's IDE in a heartbeat for something that ran in the browser. In my experience, MATLAB's IDE is a terrible piece of crap. It's slow. It's par

I would leave MATLAB's IDE in a heartbeat for something that ran in the browser. In my experience, MATLAB's IDE is a terrible piece of crap. It's slow. It's particularly slow when accessed via X11 forwarding, even from the same network. It's memory-hungry. It crashes randomly on OS X (and semi-randomly on Linux). The plots aren't anti-aliased. If you open too many plots, it runs out of Java heap space and crashes. The only thing it has going for it is the tight integration with mlint, but even that's kinda stupid because they could have just written a better optimizing compiler.

dkarl 15y ago
Why the browser? In my experience, editing text in a browser is pretty horrible. It doesn't matter for banging out HN comments or emails, but for code, I don't think I could put up with it. It's bad enough having to use the text editors in Eclipse and IntelliJ; regressing all the way to browser text boxes would be a tragedy. Is it for the sake of having persistent server sessions that don't go away when you close your client? That could easily be done, and has been done, without resorting to using a web browser. I admit that Emacs with Slime is not a paragon of simplicity and reliability, but I suspect it would be easier to recreate the convenience and polish of a web UI in an independent client (possibly based on a hacked version of Chrome or Firefox, if you really, really like your browser) than it would be to turn a text box into a decent code editor.
- simonster 15y ago
  My main reason for the browser is that it makes seamless to execute code on a remote machine. Text-based interfaces are not very useful because you can't see plots without saving them and copying them. X11 forwarding is slow. My current solution is NX, but it's not optimal, since I hate NX 4 and NX 3.5 doesn't run on Lion. Cloud9 IDE is already a decent browser-based code editor. It's already better than the MATLAB editor in just about every way but integration with the interpreter. Using a browser-based IDE will solve both the cross-platform UI issue and the remote access issue.

dkarl 15y ago

Why the browser? In my experience, editing text in a browser is pretty horrible. It doesn't matter for banging out HN comments or emails, but for code, I don't think I could put up with it. It's bad enough having to use the text editors in Eclipse and IntelliJ; regressing all the way to browser text boxes would be a tragedy. Is it for the sake of having persistent server sessions that don't go away when you close your client? That could easily be done, and has been done, without resorting to using a web browser. I admit that Emacs with Slime is not a paragon of simplicity and reliability, but I suspect it would be easier to recreate the convenience and polish of a web UI in an independent client (possibly based on a hacked version of Chrome or Firefox, if you really, really like your browser) than it would be to turn a text box into a decent code editor.

simonster 15y ago
My main reason for the browser is that it makes seamless to execute code on a remote machine. Text-based interfaces are not very useful because you can't see plots without saving them and copying them. X11 forwarding is slow. My current solution is NX, but it's not optimal, since I hate NX 4 and NX 3.5 doesn't run on Lion. Cloud9 IDE is already a decent browser-based code editor. It's already better than the MATLAB editor in just about every way but integration with the interpreter. Using a browser-based IDE will solve both the cross-platform UI issue and the remote access issue.