Comment by apl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by apl | Hacker News Reader

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Virtually none of that is in fact unique to MATLAB or even a strength in the first place.

  > Matlab is awesome above all else because the design is
  > coherent. Both the syntax and the standard libraries.

It certainly is coherent, and also consistent, but only in the weakest and least interesting sense. Namely, everything's about equally messy. Namespaces are non-existent in the standard library and clumsily realised otherwise. OOP remains rudimentary and feels as tacked-on as it happens to be. The one-function-per-file system ruins everyone's day. No standard arguments (and checking nargin loses its appeal rather fast), and shitty inlined pseudo-lambdas.

  > It is extremely quick to whip up anything and then turn
  > that into a script and then into a software with
  > functions

No different from R or Python, and most of the time a genuine weakness; it's a key reason for scientific/engineering code being as ad hoc and convoluted as it is.

  > If you as a newbie create a custom function for a
  > scalar, there's good chance it will work for vectors or
  > n-matrices automatically.

Vectorising functions in Python (that is, NumPy) is about as straightforward.

  > It's also much much faster than some looping in another
  > scripting language.

Nah, MATLAB is now fairly good at unrolling and optimising such loops. Don't worry too much about vectorising every single bit of your algorithm.

  > There's help which actually returns something sensible
  > when you type help

That's also true in the cases of both Python and R. Long story short: Most of your perceived advantages aren't unique, and that comes on top of MATLAB's exorbitant pricing schemes and extremely dubious language design. Trust me, if you think MATLAB's a particularly well-designed language for anything other than linear algebra, you owe it to yourself to check out alternatives and other languages.

True, Matlab has its limitations, but those are partly unavoidable. If you want to build a large object oriented program, you often use something more heavyweight anyway. But that heavyweight language (or framework) is usually not so quick to build something in anymore, because your heavyweight structures are just in the way in the earlier phase.

I tried Python and Numpy, and the vectors, matrices and all that felt just tacked on and the syntax was much more complex compared to Matlab. Maybe it's changed since. Also in Scilab the type conversions and function overhead are a nuisance. Every time you edit a script or function, you have to specifically reload it before running it. Makes rapid prototyping about three fold as time consuming. Would it be hard to make the software notice I actually edited something?

Many people actually want to solve problems, and they just end up creating a program as a side product. They do not set out to study libraries and do not want to actually write any code that is not directly related to the problem they are solving.

It's why Matlab is able to charge the price. It sometimes saves time. Some of the users are not primarily software developers but are quite educated and intelligent and their salary is not small.

So you're implying anyone who is a software developer is not educated or intelligent, nor has a large salary. I think a lot of people would beg to differ.

In reality, matlab only exists because of inertia. It's the same reason why microsoft windows is still around. There's no substance behind it.

He wasn't implying that. You've inverted his statement. Many economists and engineers I know care less about how they code and care more about getting a solution to the model at hand--this seems to be the poster's point. The implication is exactly what he exposited, whereas the logical inverse is what you've mistakenly deduced as the implication.

His last paragraph is not clearly worded then. It comes of as thinly veiled insult to software developers.

Perhaps it comes off that way to you but I'd be willing to bet it doesn't to the great majority of readers, because it simply isn't saying what you say it's saying.

OK, but he's worded it wrong, it gives the impression of a snarkiness. Maybe he's saying that matlab users can't program well but are still intelligent/well paid (but that doesn't really make sense since numpy is equally easy and an intelligent/educated person wouldn't find programming hard). Anyway, maybe I misread it and you're right.

edit: great, I was getting points before, and then you come along with your italics.

It's all about the illiquid karma ;). No worries.

It depends on what you're trying to do. There's no question that Python is a cleaner language with generally better support for general-purpose programming, but Matlab is really good for numerics, prototyping and exploratory data analysis.

It's also worth saying that Matlab graphics are really convenient and powerful. Last time I used matplotlib, I was very disappointed with the lack of many plot types and finickiness.

One other example is the parfor (Matlab's support for multithreaded computation in embarrassingly parallel computations like map/reduce and cross-validation). Classic Matlab -- simple, not totally orthogonal, gets you 80% of the way there without fuss. (I don't know whether to hate this tendency or love it.)

There's a reason it's so widely used, and it's not because people have not shopped around.

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