Notation as a Tool of Thought

Re:Notation as a Tool of Thought by forkandwait on Monday October 17, 2011 @10:14AM (#3120531)

I think "the inelegance of Matlab" is MUCH overstated. It has some weirdnesses, some of which are fixed in Octave (it's gnu cousin). But some apparent bad choices (anything to do with cell arrays, especially) are really quite powerful when you get to know them.

(If you ask me, R/SPLUS is the inelegant language, especially when doing serious matrix -- yuck! But it's trendy....)

Matlab is a lot like SQL -- people love to hate on it because it isn't perfect and they know it really well (because it is ubiquitous and pragmatic).

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Re:Notation as a Tool of Thought by mturmon on Monday October 17, 2011 @06:26PM (#3122766)

It has improved a lot. In the late 1990s it was decidedly behind the scripting languages of the time, and that's partly what I was referring to.

And, the weird lack-of-speed issues. It used to be that you could implement a matrix multiply, in an m-file, that would be faster than the builtin *. I benchmarked this myself.

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