grahamas
1. Worse-for-humans PR history (I currently use this for major feature checkpoints and human-involved sanity checks and review)
2. Maybe some tooling issues with IDEs? Looks like it’s all there, but maybe getting it set up so that the agents aren’t committing every little thought they have might be a bit finicky? I use VS Code if anyone has a workflow recommendation there.
What kind of tricks are you thinking of?
> I wonder if Matlab being most hated relates to people being forced to learn it in undergrad and it being poorly taught etc.
To me, as someone who has used Matlab fairly extensively both being taught in undergrad and in programming-centric grad research, Matlab's one and only strength is in its being a one-and-done IDE/programming language. If you're using Matlab, then you're using it in an IDE that "just works" and was installed and configured simultaneously with Matlab itself: there's no real distinction between the two. Further (assuming you check the right boxes during installation [1]), all the possible packages you could ever have [2] are installed at the same time. So you get a super simple install and never have to think about installing or configuring anything ever again. I don't want to minimize how useful this is. Every other programming language I've ever used has had a huge amount of installation and configuration overhead, often an insurmountable barrier for non-programmers (e.g. scientists).
That said, I dread using Matlab, for many, many reasons. My top three reasons in no particular order: 1. you can only really define one function per same-named file, 2. errors are almost always one line long (no stack trace) and rarely give a line number in normal usage, 3. cell arrays. Cell arrays are basically just untyped lists, yet somehow mind-bendingly confusing to use.
[1] assuming you paid for the right to check those boxes. If anyone is wondering, to get all the boxes in a non-personal context would cost 100x more than whatever you're thinking (which is a bit of a straw man since no single person needs all the packages and institutions get crazy bundle deals). I can't find solid numbers, but base MATLAB is $900/year/computer, and each of the ~100 packages costs $500-2000/year/computer (skewing heavily to $500). So, roughly $50k/year/computer for everything. Which is silly, obviously. Most people only want a handful of packages so realistically it's only about $2-4k/year/computer. Only. However! If you just want it for non-commercial, non-academic, non-governmental use, you can buy Matlab for only $149 + $45p, where p is the number of packages you want.
[2] Literally, all the packages you can have. Package development is 98% limited to Mathworks-official packages.
IMO the main problem is pedagogical. JS is a vast sea of conveniences that contradict conventional programming practices. This is also the reason I hesitate to recommend R as a starting language, for all that it's the de facto language of statistical analysis. Both languages are hard to teach in a coherent way, because both have lots of gotchas and exceptions that aren't bad, per se, but in the aggregate impede understanding of fundamentals.
Just yesterday I was working with someone on fundamentals in R, distinguishing between literals, variables, and functions. He got the idea, and then we got to model specification (`lm(y ~ x)`) and I had to shrug and say, those "identifiers" are different. I shudder to think of trying to teach types with a beginning student in JS.
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Most people who attended the event did not take coronavirus precautions like wearing masks and social distancing, The Associated Press reported at the time."