Re:Julia 1.0
by jordigh on Thursday August 09, 2018 @03:42PM
(#17727758)
Story time!
When Octave was getting a lot of traffic from the first Coursera machine learning class, when it was just Andrew Ng doing a course and before the Coursera org existed, we were getting a lot of novice users who would do something like
some_matrix(i,j) = 5
and get cryptic errors about how matrices cannot be indexed by complex numbers. This is because by default, in Matlab and Octave `i` and `j` are functions that evaluate to the imaginary unit. You have to overwrite the function names with `i=2, j=3` or whatever beforehand, which novices often forget. This was happening often enough that I pushed some patches to warn, "did you forget to assign i or j?" if someone tried to index matrices with complex numbers.
Point is, people in Matlab and Octave often unintentionally try to index by complex numbers.
When Octave was getting a lot of traffic from the first Coursera machine learning class, when it was just Andrew Ng doing a course and before the Coursera org existed, we were getting a lot of novice users who would do something like
and get cryptic errors about how matrices cannot be indexed by complex numbers. This is because by default, in Matlab and Octave `i` and `j` are functions that evaluate to the imaginary unit. You have to overwrite the function names with `i=2, j=3` or whatever beforehand, which novices often forget. This was happening often enough that I pushed some patches to warn, "did you forget to assign i or j?" if someone tried to index matrices with complex numbers.Point is, people in Matlab and Octave often unintentionally try to index by complex numbers.