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If you've ever done anything with matrices (and are lazy) you should have encountered Matlab. And if you haven't, it's worth checking out. Matlab made my life s

If you've ever done anything with matrices (and are lazy) you should have encountered Matlab. And if you haven't, it's worth checking out. Matlab made my life so much easier!

collyw 12y ago
My order of preference would be Python, because I know it already, and its my day to day language. As far as I know it has decent libraries. GNU Octave, as it was reccomended on the Coursera course. R as it is an open source alternative, no expensive licensing cost, so I can try it out a no risk. Would I gain anything going to Matlab, as I can see advantages with the others being open source?
- tacos 12y ago
  Are you planning on getting work done? Or are you looking forward to digging into the source of yet another GNU tool that is stuck 20 years in the past? "One of the biggest new features for the Octave 3.8.x release series is a graphical user interface. It is the one thing that users have requested most often over the last few years and now it is almost ready." If you're planning on spending more than a few hours in the tool, consider spending the $200 on the one that's from this century. I picked up Matlab late and wish I'd done so sooner. It's a REPL for higher-level thinking and quick experimentation. It makes some hard things very very simple and some simple things very hard. They've dropped the price and fixed a lot of shit in the last 5 years. It's replaced a lot of goofing around in Python and Excel for me. Edit: I have a love/hate relationship with R and more of a love relationship with Python but they don't do ANYTHING like what Matlab does.
  - GordyMD 12y ago
    Isn't Octave built with Matlab compatibility in mind? And Octave 3.8.0 was released back in December 2013 - so the GUI is already present, and from this decade. It's a great open source alternative to Matlab in my eyes for anyone that does not want to stump up $200. http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/MATLAB_Programming/Differences_between_Octave_and_MATLAB http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/MATLAB_Programming/Differences_...
    - tacos 12y ago
      Since you linked to several thousand words explaining the differences between the languages, as well as the following quote: "The plan is for the GUI to be considered stable with version 4.0" then I'll assume you haven't used either product. I assure you that I did not spend $4k just to insult the open source community. Love open source, glad they're doing it, much love to the devs -- and life is just too fucking short. If you're broke or screwing around--ok, maybe. If you're sitting in it more than an hour a week, maybe Photoshop is worth the $10/month vs GIMP, dig? And if you're in school and get it for free or are interested in getting up to speed with the state of the art in machine learning and qualify for the personal license at under 200 bucks? I can't think of a better tool.
      - GordyMD 12y ago
        Several thousand? Evidently you like to exaggerate. The content is circa 1000 words - but the point it makes in relation to this context is delivered in the first sentence. I've used both before. Matlab in my CompSci BS and MS and Octave in my professional career. I'm just making the point that your critique of Octave seems a little harsh, and to the Leyman skews the reality - that Octave is an open source alternative. Yes, a little rough around the edges if you intend to use the visual aspects of the tool, but for matrix multiplication etc it has its use cases.
        tacos 12y ago
        The page you link is actually a shortened form and links to the real list: http://wiki.octave.org/FAQ#How_is_Octave_different_from_Matlab.3F http://wiki.octave.org/FAQ#How_is_Octave_different_from_Matl... which comes in at 2,662 words. The parts you say are good about Octave are EXACTLY the stuff I use Python and R for. If you want to use a Matlab library or toolkit, maybe cut in paste some code from a paper, do a quick 'what if' thing -- Octave just doesn't cut it. (My point in speaking up here isn't to diss Octave it's to re-center the reality around Matlab.)
      - profinger 12y ago
        For the record, Photoshop > (GIMP)x10000 IMHO. (Just finally glad I found someone that may agree) I've not used Matlab but I've used Octave (during the ml class from Andrew Ng) and it wasn't too awful. Occasionally very frustrating though so if Matlab solves those frustrations I could see it being worth it if you're going to spend time in it!
- kriro 12y ago
  I've used Scilab/Xcos a bit for continuous simulation. I know there is the ANN toolbox but I haven't used it. It's a pretty usable Free "Matlab clone" but I usually only see GNU Octave mentioned. Just tossing it out there, as I said I mostly use it to draw pretty Lorenz attractors ;)
- rndn 12y ago
  What about Mathematica?
  - friesenj 12y ago
    Agreed, I'm surprised people aren't talking more about Mathematica. I feel like it is a way nicer experience, the user community is great and the built-in computable data is awesome. It's expensive, so it may not make sense for messing around, but for real prototyping and deployable APIs, it's worth it.
- dagw 12y ago
  Octave is basically a poor mans Matlab. If you think Octave might a good answer then Matlab is definitely a better answer if you can afford it. Matlab has better performance, a better IDE and a much bigger collection of libraries. That being said Matlab is a pretty poor language for anything beyond prototyping and testing proofs of concept. And when I'm doing anything that might turn out become a longer lived project I always choose Python and numpy.

If you've ever done anything with matrices (and are lazy) you should have encountered Matlab. And if you haven't, it's worth checking out. Matlab made my life so much easier!

collyw 12y ago

My order of preference would be Python, because I know it already, and its my day to day language. As far as I know it has decent libraries. GNU Octave, as it was reccomended on the Coursera course. R as it is an open source alternative, no expensive licensing cost, so I can try it out a no risk. Would I gain anything going to Matlab, as I can see advantages with the others being open source?

tacos 12y ago
Are you planning on getting work done? Or are you looking forward to digging into the source of yet another GNU tool that is stuck 20 years in the past? "One of the biggest new features for the Octave 3.8.x release series is a graphical user interface. It is the one thing that users have requested most often over the last few years and now it is almost ready." If you're planning on spending more than a few hours in the tool, consider spending the $200 on the one that's from this century. I picked up Matlab late and wish I'd done so sooner. It's a REPL for higher-level thinking and quick experimentation. It makes some hard things very very simple and some simple things very hard. They've dropped the price and fixed a lot of shit in the last 5 years. It's replaced a lot of goofing around in Python and Excel for me. Edit: I have a love/hate relationship with R and more of a love relationship with Python but they don't do ANYTHING like what Matlab does.
- GordyMD 12y ago
  Isn't Octave built with Matlab compatibility in mind? And Octave 3.8.0 was released back in December 2013 - so the GUI is already present, and from this decade. It's a great open source alternative to Matlab in my eyes for anyone that does not want to stump up $200. http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/MATLAB_Programming/Differences_between_Octave_and_MATLAB http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/MATLAB_Programming/Differences_...
  - tacos 12y ago
    Since you linked to several thousand words explaining the differences between the languages, as well as the following quote: "The plan is for the GUI to be considered stable with version 4.0" then I'll assume you haven't used either product. I assure you that I did not spend $4k just to insult the open source community. Love open source, glad they're doing it, much love to the devs -- and life is just too fucking short. If you're broke or screwing around--ok, maybe. If you're sitting in it more than an hour a week, maybe Photoshop is worth the $10/month vs GIMP, dig? And if you're in school and get it for free or are interested in getting up to speed with the state of the art in machine learning and qualify for the personal license at under 200 bucks? I can't think of a better tool.
    - GordyMD 12y ago
      Several thousand? Evidently you like to exaggerate. The content is circa 1000 words - but the point it makes in relation to this context is delivered in the first sentence. I've used both before. Matlab in my CompSci BS and MS and Octave in my professional career. I'm just making the point that your critique of Octave seems a little harsh, and to the Leyman skews the reality - that Octave is an open source alternative. Yes, a little rough around the edges if you intend to use the visual aspects of the tool, but for matrix multiplication etc it has its use cases.
      - tacos 12y ago
        The page you link is actually a shortened form and links to the real list: http://wiki.octave.org/FAQ#How_is_Octave_different_from_Matlab.3F http://wiki.octave.org/FAQ#How_is_Octave_different_from_Matl... which comes in at 2,662 words. The parts you say are good about Octave are EXACTLY the stuff I use Python and R for. If you want to use a Matlab library or toolkit, maybe cut in paste some code from a paper, do a quick 'what if' thing -- Octave just doesn't cut it. (My point in speaking up here isn't to diss Octave it's to re-center the reality around Matlab.)
    - profinger 12y ago
      For the record, Photoshop > (GIMP)x10000 IMHO. (Just finally glad I found someone that may agree) I've not used Matlab but I've used Octave (during the ml class from Andrew Ng) and it wasn't too awful. Occasionally very frustrating though so if Matlab solves those frustrations I could see it being worth it if you're going to spend time in it!
kriro 12y ago
I've used Scilab/Xcos a bit for continuous simulation. I know there is the ANN toolbox but I haven't used it. It's a pretty usable Free "Matlab clone" but I usually only see GNU Octave mentioned. Just tossing it out there, as I said I mostly use it to draw pretty Lorenz attractors ;)
rndn 12y ago
What about Mathematica?
- friesenj 12y ago
  Agreed, I'm surprised people aren't talking more about Mathematica. I feel like it is a way nicer experience, the user community is great and the built-in computable data is awesome. It's expensive, so it may not make sense for messing around, but for real prototyping and deployable APIs, it's worth it.
dagw 12y ago
Octave is basically a poor mans Matlab. If you think Octave might a good answer then Matlab is definitely a better answer if you can afford it. Matlab has better performance, a better IDE and a much bigger collection of libraries. That being said Matlab is a pretty poor language for anything beyond prototyping and testing proofs of concept. And when I'm doing anything that might turn out become a longer lived project I always choose Python and numpy.