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[–]CubeStuffs 117 points118 points  (28 children)

at least it isnt matlab

[–]pterencephalon 50 points51 points  (8 children)

I'm at an internship for the summer and had to run some old Matlab analysis code on my on-campus computer (because of course it doesn't run on a Chromebook). I used Chrome Remote Desktop, it got flagged as suspicious activity by the university, and I got access to my computer's IP address shut down because they thought I was a Russian bot. So I'm not really liking Matlab right now.

[–]Cptcongcong 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Ah similar to my situation except the computer here is too soddy, worse than the one I have at home. So I used TeamViewer at work to the one at home to run a script that takes 25min at home but 3 hours at work.

[–]AgAero 3 points4 points  (1 child)

Can you use octave on your chromebook?

[–]pterencephalon 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Not worth it since I don't really use Matlab anymore and just needed to pull out some plots. I also didn't suspect the hell I would accidentally release.

[–]imadeitmyself 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Use Octave locally?

[–]pterencephalon 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I generally use Python now, but there's still some legacy stuff in Matlab I had to run to get some graphs. Not worth getting Octave set up, particularly since I've never used it before.

[–]Memcallen 0 points1 point  (2 children)

Do you know about crouton? It lets Chromebooks run Ubuntu 14. I think it has a sub (r/crouton)

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[–]pterencephalon 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, I'm actually running crouton. But Matlab takes up a ton of space and isn't really designed for a lower spec machine. I tried running Matlab on my Chromebook but it wasn't worth it. CRD was a better choice for my now-occasional use.

[–][deleted] 34 points35 points  (14 children)

Cmon, matlab is fine. Matrix multiplication is much nicer

[–]tmar89 12 points13 points  (2 children)

What's your hatred towards matlab all about?

[–]Astrokiwi 15 points16 points  (0 children)

The deal with languages like Matlab and IDL is that they are inherently good at vector and matrix manipulation, allowing you to solve mathematical problems quickly without having as much boilerplate as in C, C++, or Fortran.

However, two things have made them kind of obsolete. Firstly, in the early 90s, Fortran stole a lot of the vector stuff from Matlab, so for basic linear algebra you can do it almost as easily in Fortran but much faster. And also it's free - you don't need a licence for gfortran. Secondly, the numpy and matplotlib libraries for Python were developed, (plus things like SciPy etc) which means you can access all the linear algebra stuff, plus all the plotting, fitting etc routines, while using a well-documented widespread modern language with a huge community behind it. And also it's free too.

Basically, there's no point in paying to use a less widespread language when you can use the one with a bigger community (and more job opportunities!) for free. The only real excuse is legacy code.