[minirant] wtf MATLAB, WTF!

[randumb]

Originally posted by: eLiu

Originally posted by: randumb

Originally posted by: jiggahertz

Originally posted by: randumb

Originally posted by: eLiu

Originally posted by: notposting
PEBKAC = Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair....aka the user.

No wai! I'm infallible! haha

hypn0tik, yeah I know. Esp this new version (2007a). I've had more weird problems with this than any other version of matlab. The other day one of my coworkers had a weird dimension mismatch error. After looking through the code, we found nothing so I asked her to run it again for kicks... and voila, it worked the 2nd time. Srsly.

Yeah, I hate MATLAB. Besides buggy behavior, the interface is slow and the syntax is inconsistent. How did this become the standard tool in CS/Engineering?

Rapid prototyping and the ease of use for matrices/visualization/data manipulation.

There are plenty of other tools available that are better IMO. In bioinformatics research for example, R has become extremely popular.

What would you suggest for working with ODEs (ivp & bvp) or linear algebra? I mean there's Octave, but it isn't much different... ODEs in Maple can be pretty awkward (not to mention slow), and linalg is even worse. You could fire up FORTRAN77 and link to LAPACK, but I mean come on, that's a lot more work than opening matlab and typing eig().

R is often seen as a statistical computing language, but it can be used to do a lot of general numerical analysis work. I've done of a lot of prototyping of machine learning algorithms in R and I find the syntax significantly cleaner. There are also tons of nice UIs for R available. There is also a really powerful plugin (ESS) for interfacing with R via Emacs. The nicest thing about R is that there's a very strong, unified community and they have a central package repository (CRAN), which makes it really easy to find the packages you need. Other alternatives I've briefly used are Python+SciPy and Mathematica.

Edit: I'm not saying MATLAB is that bad; it always gets the job done with some annoyances. But for a tool that's so widely used, it could be A LOT better.

 

[darthsidious]

Originally posted by: randumb

R is often seen as a statistical computing language, but it can be used to do a lot of general numerical analysis work. I've done of a lot of prototyping of machine learning algorithms in R and I find the syntax significantly cleaner. There are also tons of nice UIs for R available. There is also a really powerful plugin (ESS) for interfacing with R via Emacs. The nicest thing about R is that there's a very strong, unified community and they have a central package repository (CRAN), which makes it really easy to find the packages you need. Other alternatives I've briefly used are Python+SciPy and Mathematica.

Harvard alert!!! Don't listen to anything he says, Eric!!

 

[randumb]

Originally posted by: dullard
I haven't used MATLAB much at all. But isn't it based on Maple? If so, Maple had a bad habit of forgetting to initialize variables even if you explicityly did it. Thus, I'd start looking here:

Originally posted by: eLiu
Besides, every variable is initialized to my desired starting value (usually 0) anyway, so even if the previous statement were false, it wouldn't matter.

Double check to see if it really is initializing to your desired starting value, or if it is using the last value from the previous iteration. As with any ODE solver, a change like that to your initial value would be expected to give results like what you are experiencing.

MATLAB actually began as a wrapper for LINPACK and EISPACK. What you're probably thinking of is Maple's engine being added to MATLAB to give it some symbolic capabilities.

 

[randumb]

Originally posted by: darthsidious

Originally posted by: randumb

R is often seen as a statistical computing language, but it can be used to do a lot of general numerical analysis work. I've done of a lot of prototyping of machine learning algorithms in R and I find the syntax significantly cleaner. There are also tons of nice UIs for R available. There is also a really powerful plugin (ESS) for interfacing with R via Emacs. The nicest thing about R is that there's a very strong, unified community and they have a central package repository (CRAN), which makes it really easy to find the packages you need. Other alternatives I've briefly used are Python+SciPy and Mathematica.

Harvard alert!!! Don't listen to anything he says, Eric!!

Yeah, I'm actually trying to convert everyone at MIT to inferior tools. Then we can finally defeat them using MATLAB. Muahaha.

 

[josh0099]

Originally posted by: randumb

Originally posted by: darthsidious

Originally posted by: randumb

R is often seen as a statistical computing language, but it can be used to do a lot of general numerical analysis work. I've done of a lot of prototyping of machine learning algorithms in R and I find the syntax significantly cleaner. There are also tons of nice UIs for R available. There is also a really powerful plugin (ESS) for interfacing with R via Emacs. The nicest thing about R is that there's a very strong, unified community and they have a central package repository (CRAN), which makes it really easy to find the packages you need. Other alternatives I've briefly used are Python+SciPy and Mathematica.

Harvard alert!!! Don't listen to anything he says, Eric!!

Yeah, I'm actually trying to convert everyone at MIT to inferior tools. Then we can finally defeat them using MATLAB. Muahaha.

Just two questions...
1. Whats your major?
2. How far are you in your major?