Hacker News Reader

> But I'm curious where octave is popular. Does anyone pick it over julia or python when starting a new project/research?

In many non-CS engineering disciplines Octave (and Matlab) is quite common. For doing everyday numerical calculations. Python and Julia do not compete with the simplicity of using GNU Octave.

View on HN

>> Python and Julia do not compete with the simplicity of using GNU Octave.

Python I understand. The numpy notation sucks big time for translating straighforward notation of engineering disciplines and is a huge step backwards in readability; but Julia? That's a surprise. In fact the opening code in the Octave page can be copied almost exactly into Julia and it works.

The big simplicity is that you install octave and you have a gui development environment ready to go. Julia and vscode are great, but setting up a project with all dependencies is a little more work for university students with no programing experience .

I actively despise how MATLAB code looks, despite spending years using it. I spent 6 months translating a library to python and it was so difficult to understand what it was trying to do because of how it was represented. I find numpy notation much easier to grok. For sure, you can do interesting indexing that makes it hard to understand, but that isn't even possible in MATLAB.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com