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In the real world, I mainly see people using R or SAS : especially in the web or ecommerce domain. I hardly ever see people using Matlab. Moreover, a lot of res
by sandGorgon 14y ago
In the real world, I mainly see people using R or SAS : especially in the web or ecommerce domain. I hardly ever see people using Matlab. Moreover, a lot of research papers publish R code.
If Octave's only claim to fame is being the poorer cousin of Matlab, I wonder why universities still use Octave to teach anything. I would much rather that they use R : which pretty much ensures that the students have an open source path to use it in the future.
- cageface 14y agoThe thing that most impressed me about R when I was dabbling with it was the quality of the graphing tools. It was very easy to create all kinds of very polished looking and expressive graphs. It was a lot more work to get comparable results in Octave and NumPy.
- tomrod 14y agoOctave and Matlab are pretty easy for people with no programming whatsoever to pick up. Engineering and economics thrive in the Matlab world, especially in academia. It's a fairly good setup for them.
- sandGorgon 14y ago>Engineering and economics thrive in the Matlab world, especially in academia. It's a fairly good setup for them. This is precisely what I'm concerned about. R is open source and used in production in various high profile places around the world. Matlab has the same (or lesser?) expressive power and is very expensive. Why is Matlab (or its derivative Octave - often sold as "if you dont have Matlab...") used in academia at all ?