std_throwawayay
std_throwawayay on Hacker News
If you increase the skillset of your employees you get back something along the way, so it's not just money wasted but also collecting a lot of interest. Also you become attractive for employees who want to grow. It's easy for the beancounters to count all the wasted money but it's not so easy to evaluate the real productivity that such employees give back. Maybe if companies were allowed to trade employees like cattle that mindset would change.
The next generation of professors.
Why should anyone use Octave over Matlab?
- Licensing cost.
- Freedom.
Why should anyone learn Octave instead of Python?
- It's a bit easier to get started for scientists who are not programmers.
- If you mostly do vector/matrix math, the language is nice.
- Otherwise I don't know any good point.
All in all I like a free alternative to Matlab but have the feeling that most people are just better served by joining the much bigger Python ecosystem. (Or maybe R/Julia/Rust which I don't know so much about in this context.)
What I'm also saying is that I think that other fish (or lifeforms in general) will take their place.
I agree that the oceans change - a lot - due to human influence. Some species will dwindle in numbers and disappear. It takes a long time for new species to emerge. But what I'm not so sure is that the overall change necessarily would have to be so negative in the long run.
I thought that overfishing the kinds of big fish we like to eat will just lead to a growing population of smaller fish and other marine life.
For me, the keyboard kills it. It feels cheap. It almost feels like there's no keys at all like the glass surface that is rumored to come. I'm sure that's great for people who are media consumers but producers of media and software often like to have a keyboard. To me it feels like they missed the market and try to sell products at premium price to normal customers.
Also, the lack of HDMI and one USB-A port on each side would hinder my workflow.
Other languages achieve a good compromise by clustering data structures into fewer parts with only a handful of mutexes that are locked while other threads work on different datasets. This is usually done manually and with great care as it is the heart of both safety and performance. I don't know if there is an automatic solution to this problem that is compatible with the way python programs are structured.
The libraries basically assume that, while you call them, nothing else changes. In order to ensure that you need to lock everything down. Because you don't know what these libraries do and what data they access it needs to be everything (like it is today). It should be possible to only lock the GIL when such a library is called, so there should be kind of a middle way forward.
The data structures are slow by design.
The way we use these data structures is quite inefficient.
Having a fast interpreter only about doubles the execution speed in most programs leaving another factor of 50 open for future generations.
Many libraries are not prepared for the disappearance of the GIL and while it's not a general problem for python per se it will be a great amount of work to make every library compatible with GILless python.
Therefore I think that you must always provide an option for the GIL that is enabled by default in order to provide backward compatibility.
* The kernel already contains some C++ which (if you ask C programmers) is not C. And many C programmers are more likely to accept Rust than having to deal with C++.
* AFAIK there is not gcc front-end for Rust yet but LLVM tools can compile the kernel, too. When Rust stabilizes gcc support may come, too.
* The barrier for entry could be lowered by using Rust for Rust programmers if it is employed in some specific modules. The resulting code could be more clear. Not everything in the kernel is pointer pointing and bit shuffling.
* The number of architectures that Rust supports are growing daily.
One or both of the theories has to be wrong but I cannot decide. I can learn and read all about it and take both viewpoints into account but I still cannot decide. I could do my own research but I would come up with one or the other answer depending on what data I look at but it's not better than what I have already.
What should I do?
This is a real problem because science cannot provide the correct answer. It is more about choosing a side and sticking with it than about finding the truth.
Now I use Python exclusively. The language is so much better and more sane and almost any library is available. I will never go back.
Today, I would recommend Matlab only in rare circumstances. Currently I cannot think of one use case that I had in the last three years where I would prefer Matlab to Python. Using the Matlab language with a portable Octave installation can be useful for teaching matrix/vector topics to people who have little programming experience and don't know Python. You can get results very quickly. The syntax feels most natural for manipulating matrices and everything seems to be a matrix.
Other than that I think the Matlab language and ecosystem is kind of a dead end. But it will provide profits for a few more decades due to sheer inertia.
That's what everybody inside the bubble thinks. That's what they must think. It's what makes the bubble work. The bubble must always contain some forgotten ingredient that makes it special. Something that people do not remember about the past bubbles. Then nobody inside the bubble can prove that it will burst and if it's not provable maybe it won't burst.
It starts with an idea that looks good on paper and a bunch of scientists investigating it. At one point it gets picked up by the management of a company and commercialization is being started while the technology is not ready yet. Now you have high-risk development of a new technology in the framework of commercial management. Failing is no option anymore. During the development it becomes clear to some insiders that the goals cannot be achieved. To those are three options. Either they quit, they shut up or they upsell what they have. Plans become bigger and bigger and the deadline shifts later and later. The later you are, the more sunk costs you have and the bigger your plans need to be to recoup the costs and keep your department alive. This is what I consider the when it becomes a scam. It started with science but instead of burying the dead horse it is paraded around town and management applauds while those who know do not talk.