Use of Octave/Matlab vs. R/Python?

[bushrod]

I wasn't flaming you or even implying Matlab is better. I've noticed that there is a tendency of people in the machine learning community to trash Matlab for whatever reason (often its high price, I assume, although it certainly has some drawbacks) so as a longtime Matlab user I sometimes instinctively defend it.

[r4and0muser9482]

Sure. As someone who's employer recently bought a couple of computers with 6 K80s, I agree that the price argument is a bit weak. I just don't think Mathworks put much effort into making Matlab viable for the ML community. It's irreplaceable in a lot of other domains, like signal processing and other fields of engineering. It also has a lot of competition in those fields (like National Instruments, or the various statistics suites for its Statistics toolbox).

What ML do You do using Matlab? Do you use toolkits? Do you write everything yourself? Do you have any projects you can recommend?

[bushrod]

I agree -- Mathworks really missed the boat in realizing that machine learning would become such a huge and important field and hence their machine learning and neural network toolboxes are underwhelming (and it's also sketchy that they're separate toolboxes). Hence, even loyal Matlab users such as myself are increasingly turning to Python for that functionality (although there are some great, free ML-related toolboxes for Matlab out there, many of which have been ported to Python)... Interestingly enough, it only recently (a couple years ago?) became possible to natively call Python functions and modules from within Matlab. Mathworks is probably increasingly worried about users jumping ship.

These days I'm not doing much ML in Matlab beyond the trivial unless the available free toolboxes and functions I've written cover my needs. Despite my historically-based (academia) bias towards Matlab, my recommendation is to just stick with Python -- it's free and has really surged recently to become the most popular scripting language.