5 ms·

Out of curiosity, why not use Matlab?

by pekk 14y ago

nightski 14y ago
Can't speak for him but personally I find Matlab to be rather expensive for commercial use and it totally falls apart when you need to do anything outside of numerical computation. It is really nice having a full on general purpose programming language to use right next to your scientific code.
- jofer 14y ago
  Don't forget maintainability. Anything moderately complex in matlab quickly becomes a maintainability nightmare, in my experience. Matlab discourages modularity (functions have to be either one line or in a separate file), and writing tests of any sort is unnecessarily difficult in Matlab. Beyond that, Numpy is remarkably clean once you know how to use it. How many times do you see "tile" and "repmat" calls in matlab just to multiply two matrices? Numpy's broadcasting is a simple but remarkably useful feature. Finally, numpy gives you much tighter control over memory usage than matlab does. This was actually the main reason I switched, personally. I didn't realize how much I was missing for quite awhile.
  - apl 14y ago
    > functions have to be either one line or in a separate file Hasn't been true for a while now. You can have sub-routines and scope-local functions within functions now; embedding a procedure within a script is, of course, still impossible. So the situation has improved ever so slightly...
    - jofer 14y ago
      Good point. I was thinking of lacking functions within scripts, which is quite annoying for small projects, but not a major problem for larger things.
TorKlingberg 14y ago
The programming language in Matlab is not very good. The main advantages of Matlab is that is has so many built in functions and great plotting tools. There are a lot of plugins too (often commercial). Matlab is also not open source and rather expensive. There is GNU Octave which is free and mostly compatible with Matlab.
dimitar 14y ago
* functions have to be written in separate files than "scripts" * language features are mostly about matrix manipulation * OO and functional programming are rudimentary at best * you will avoid newer features because they are buggy and your colleagues will probably have older versions anyway. * you might dislike the crashing IDE * MATLAB is essentially a niche language compared to the universality of python. The reasons to use Matlab: * your program structure is going to be simple probably a single algorithm applied to many matrices or a few files(streams) * toolboxes * toolboxes * toolboxes * Simulink
rflrob 14y ago
Strings in python are much easier to deal with, so if your program is going to do almost anything with them, Matlab is a royal pain.
rflrob 14y ago
Strings in python are much easier to deal with, so if your program is going to do almost anything with them, Matlab is a royal pain.
rflrob 14y ago
Strings in python are much easier to deal with, so if your program is going to do almost anything with them, Matlab is a royal pain.
jlgreco 14y ago
There were several reasons, most of what other people mention here factored in. Matlab was being a PITA to deploy because of the licensing, Octave wasn't matching it in performance, it's relatively unpleasant to work with, etc. The big reason though is that I was trying to use it "in production" with MCC and it just really wasn't up for the task. It became a nightmare to debug and had major stability issues; I couldn't keep it running for more than a few hours. The logged errors were cryptic null-pointer exceptions from deep down the stack and the input that caused those conditions would run fine upon restarting the process. A real nightmare to deal with. Eventually I realized that I'd spent a solid two days worth of work trying to fix it with no end in sight and decided that splitting off all the logic into a twisted service wrapping NumPy could be done in less time than I was probably going to continue spending messing with Matlab/MCC. Took about a day to do that, and mostly because some of the math was slightly beyond me so I had to use some significant caution. Ran like a dream after that for months.
MichaelSalib 14y ago
Cost is a huge issue. My spouse worked with an image processing professor on her master's degree and he was converting his entire group from Matlab to numpy. While academic licenses for Matlab are very cheap, they don't actually allow you to publish research in journals; for that you need a much more expensive class of license.
renanbirck 14y ago
Licensing costs (and the student version is full of limitations - compare to the student version of Mathematica, which has almost no limitations), missing features (e.g. weak OO), vendor lock-in (specially when 99% of your coworkers "just use a pirated copy, it's what we do") etc...

Out of curiosity, why not use Matlab?

by pekk 14y ago

Out of curiosity, why not use Matlab?

Can't speak for him but personally I find Matlab to be rather expensive for commercial use and it totally falls apart when you need to do anything outside of numerical computation. It is really nice having a full on general purpose programming language to use right next to your scientific code.

jofer 14y ago
Don't forget maintainability. Anything moderately complex in matlab quickly becomes a maintainability nightmare, in my experience. Matlab discourages modularity (functions have to be either one line or in a separate file), and writing tests of any sort is unnecessarily difficult in Matlab. Beyond that, Numpy is remarkably clean once you know how to use it. How many times do you see "tile" and "repmat" calls in matlab just to multiply two matrices? Numpy's broadcasting is a simple but remarkably useful feature. Finally, numpy gives you much tighter control over memory usage than matlab does. This was actually the main reason I switched, personally. I didn't realize how much I was missing for quite awhile.
- apl 14y ago
  > functions have to be either one line or in a separate file Hasn't been true for a while now. You can have sub-routines and scope-local functions within functions now; embedding a procedure within a script is, of course, still impossible. So the situation has improved ever so slightly...
  - jofer 14y ago
    Good point. I was thinking of lacking functions within scripts, which is quite annoying for small projects, but not a major problem for larger things.

TorKlingberg 14y ago

The programming language in Matlab is not very good. The main advantages of Matlab is that is has so many built in functions and great plotting tools. There are a lot of plugins too (often commercial). Matlab is also not open source and rather expensive. There is GNU Octave which is free and mostly compatible with Matlab.

dimitar 14y ago

* functions have to be written in separate files than "scripts" * language features are mostly about matrix manipulation * OO and functional programming are rudimentary at best * you will avoid newer features because they are buggy and your colleagues will probably have older versions anyway. * you might dislike the crashing IDE * MATLAB is essentially a niche language compared to the universality of python. The reasons to use Matlab: * your program structure is going to be simple probably a single algorithm applied to many matrices or a few files(streams) * toolboxes * toolboxes * toolboxes * Simulink

rflrob 14y ago

Strings in python are much easier to deal with, so if your program is going to do almost anything with them, Matlab is a royal pain.

rflrob 14y ago

Strings in python are much easier to deal with, so if your program is going to do almost anything with them, Matlab is a royal pain.

rflrob 14y ago

Strings in python are much easier to deal with, so if your program is going to do almost anything with them, Matlab is a royal pain.

jlgreco 14y ago

There were several reasons, most of what other people mention here factored in. Matlab was being a PITA to deploy because of the licensing, Octave wasn't matching it in performance, it's relatively unpleasant to work with, etc. The big reason though is that I was trying to use it "in production" with MCC and it just really wasn't up for the task. It became a nightmare to debug and had major stability issues; I couldn't keep it running for more than a few hours. The logged errors were cryptic null-pointer exceptions from deep down the stack and the input that caused those conditions would run fine upon restarting the process. A real nightmare to deal with. Eventually I realized that I'd spent a solid two days worth of work trying to fix it with no end in sight and decided that splitting off all the logic into a twisted service wrapping NumPy could be done in less time than I was probably going to continue spending messing with Matlab/MCC. Took about a day to do that, and mostly because some of the math was slightly beyond me so I had to use some significant caution. Ran like a dream after that for months.

MichaelSalib 14y ago

Cost is a huge issue. My spouse worked with an image processing professor on her master's degree and he was converting his entire group from Matlab to numpy. While academic licenses for Matlab are very cheap, they don't actually allow you to publish research in journals; for that you need a much more expensive class of license.

renanbirck 14y ago

Licensing costs (and the student version is full of limitations - compare to the student version of Mathematica, which has almost no limitations), missing features (e.g. weak OO), vendor lock-in (specially when 99% of your coworkers "just use a pirated copy, it's what we do") etc...