Hacker News Reader

I tried Julia but the compilation time for interactive use was just too insane.

I ended up paying £125 for MATLAB. Nothing else really remotely compares to MATLAB's plotting facilities.

Did you tried Octave, GNU's numerical package that is compatible to MATLAB?

Of course! The language implementation is decent and the GUI is promising, except for the most important feature of the GUI - the plot viewer, which is completely awful. Forget about the same league, it's not even playing the same game as MATLAB.

I use Matlab daily, and the plotting is indeed excellent.

But the language itself is a horrible kludgy mess. Most of the development time is spent on input parsing and contorting your code into a vectorized shape.

Yeah I agree the language is not great, especially for non-matrix things. But Julia isn't exactly great either (unsurprisingly since it is pretty much a MATLAB derivative).

But I only use it for prototyping. I would absolutely not recommend it for production code. If there's some gnarly input processing to be done I'll do that in another language and just have it output CSV or similar.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com