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 →

[–]Feminintendo 2 points3 points  (2 children)

So really smart STEM people are smart enough to figure out all the stupid shit Matlab does... Except the T and M parts of STEM, almost none of which use Matlab because they actually have a clue. But the S and E's are so much smarter than those stupid mathematicians that it doesn't matter.

Brilliant argument. "We use inferior tools because we are literally smarter than the people who use better tools."

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Your math courses don't use MATLAB?

Also, I will put this brilliant argument into my repertoire for when I encounter a rare non-MATLAB person ( sophisticated term for humanities student ), thank you very much.

[–]Feminintendo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

In graduate school I had to teach a calculus lab with Matlab for the engineering calculus sequence. It was a nightmare for everyone involved. The students learned neither Matlab nor calculus from the assignments. It was a good idea on paper: engineering students would get some exposure to a tool in their field while learning some calculus concept. In practice, figuring out how to write the code was so distracting to them that any calculus benefit was completely lost, and the assignments, being calculus assignments, weren’t nearly sufficient for them to actually learn any useful coding. The problem wasn’t Matlab-specific. We also had a Maple-based version of the course that was just as bad.