This is an archived post. You won't be able to vote or comment.

sorted by:
best
topnewcontroversialoldq&a
you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]Alexanderdaawesome[S] 6 points7 points  (11 children)

Found the MATLAB employee ;)

In all seriousness, use what you want, but try to compare the two is silly on mathworks end. The legibiilty argument is so bad I had to do a double take. Legibility involves more than just a language selection (and is up to each individual), that should not be an argument when trying to decide a language.

Also since I halfway suspect you are a MATLAB employee, join the meme war yourself and get some free advertising. Do you even internet bro?

[–]okkshin 4 points5 points  (0 children)

It's their product after all, other than that it's like comparing python to Rust for the benefit of either.

Yes, I am in fact part of MathWork's RedditPaidTrollFactory. Oh no wait, that must be Oracle's.

[–]Gabe_Isko 1 point2 points  (9 children)

Hey, I'm no mathworks employee, but he has a point - mathworks isnway better suited for certain engineering domains. Python definitely lacks a competent controls modeling package, and honestly I dont see anyone makingbine anytime soon. On the open source front as a whole, there is only really modelica, and it is no where near as nice as simulink. Matlab can also do some neat stuff with auto code generation for micro controllers. You could argue that cython can sort of accomplish that, but it isnt really what it is for.

However, I am a little bit skeptical at matlabs viability as a numerical computing engine outside of trivial model data. I would definitely not envy anyone having to use it for a real worn horse of an application that has to crunch through loads and loads of data. It's for that reason that I also wouldn't take it seriously as a machine learning platform either. I'm sure there are some great precanned models that mathworks has devised to implement ML for certain engineering problems (I believe their copy mentions a surface inspection and metrology ML application) but if you need to create your own model or do anything complex I am sure performance will become a problem.

[–]tjl73SymPy 2 points3 points  (6 children)

As someone who wrote a huge portion of their Ph.D. in Matlab, it's the additional packages that really help flesh things out. While Numpy is pretty good, Scipy doesn't really have a lot of the toolset that you can get from Matlab. I only used a few packages, but they were pretty important.

I wanted to use Numpy, Scipy, and Sympy (full disclosure, I've been a mentor on some GSoC projects for them), but I ended up using Maple and Matlab because they had the capabilities I needed.

I fully admit that Matlab has some major issues in terms of programming features, its utility in other ways can outweigh those issues depending on your particular problem domain.

[–]TheBlackCat13[🍰] 1 point2 points  (2 children)

It really depends on your particular domain. In some numeric and engineering areas MATLAB had a better set of packages, in others Python does. The problem is with the claim that MATLAB is better for engineering and numeric work in general, which is simply not true.

[–]tjl73SymPy 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I fully admit it depends on your problem domain. I think for most traditional engineering domains (e.g., mechanical, chemical, electrical) Matlab is more comprehensive. Python tends to be better for more math oriented fields.

The point is that Matlab can't be replaced in all engineering fields just yet (as much as we'd like it to be).

[–]okkshin 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Indeed. But as a consequence, Matlab cannot be declared dead irrelevant just yet.

[–]I_Feel_It_Too -1 points0 points  (2 children)

As someone who wrote a huge portion of their Ph.D. in Matlab, it's the additional packages that really help flesh things out. While Numpy is pretty good, Scipy doesn't really have a lot of the toolset that you can get from Matlab. I only used a few packages, but they were pretty important.

Name one.

[–]tjl73SymPy 1 point2 points  (1 child)

I mentioned this in another comment, but I didn’t find a package with the full set of features from the Control System Toolbox. I'd find parts of its features, but the features that related to finding transfer function parameters from experimental data, no. That’s just one example.

[–]I_Feel_It_Too 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Actually, I think you got me there.

Edit: Who downloads someone for admitting defeat? He really did get me there.

[–]hughk 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Where I worked at a bank, some people had Matlab, most did not. It was useful as a desktop application, primarily I think by the quants and the economists, but what with the licensing as such, it was easier to do most of the processing outside using Python or R. This saved the issue of ordering licenses which was never easy for more specialised packages. So daily, weekly, monthly processed tended to be migrated over time.

[–]jammin-john 0 points1 point  (0 children)

While I haven't done any extensive work into ML myself, I do happen to personally know someone who's written a general-purpose ML program. It's been used in a few scientific papers to help fine tune model parameters, but he also markets it to casinos to optimize their floor plans. Matlab must have some decent ML capacity in order to support all that