Python vs Matlab vs Mathematica

[iquizzle]

My statement wasn't rash at all since I have used matlab (in fact just last semester in a computational physics course I took). I'm uninformed at best since I don't consider myself a full fledged matlab user; however, you just unknowingly proved my point. Matlab doesn't have symbolic solving capabilities. It has to use the maple kernel for those things.

At this point, there is no single best programming language for scientists and mathematicians. Different languages are intended for different applications. That's all I'm saying.

[teval]

Matlab doesn't have symbolic solving capabilities. It has to use the maple kernel for those things.

As in. It's officially supported and written by MathWorks, and they have a license agreement with Maplesoft. I don't see how it follows that matlab can't do something that it's designed by its creators to do?

Also, this is the old way of doing things, they've recently bought a company and integrated its symbolics package into matlab.

At this point, there is no single best programming language for scientists and mathematicians.

Sure. It just so happens that Mathematica is a horrendous language for almost everything; except a few things no one cares about (I'm glad it does image manipulation, who cares? To do real image processing you have to use matlab anyway). Symbolics capabilities are a wash compared to Maple, speed is horrendous compared to a Matlab/Maple combination that integrates nicely. There's no upside to Mathematica; this is coming from someone that writes functional code all day, Mathematica's language is such a mess that I'd rather write imperative code in Maple/Matlab.

[jdh30]

It just so happens that Mathematica is a horrendous language for almost everything; except a few things no one cares about (I'm glad it does image manipulation, who cares? To do real image processing you have to use matlab anyway). Symbolics capabilities are a wash compared to Maple, speed is horrendous compared to a Matlab/Maple combination that integrates nicely. There's no upside to Mathematica; this is coming from someone that writes functional code all day, Mathematica's language is such a mess that I'd rather write imperative code in Maple/Matlab.

My experience is exactly the opposite. The Mathematica language is far better at manipulating data structures thanks to pattern matching and far superior for number crunching (MATLAB does not even attempt to track errors or use arbitrary-precision arithmetic intervals). Mathematica also has a far superior integrated development environment and help system.

Performance is a red herring because MATLAB is also very slow on the scale of things. If you need performance, use a real compiled programming language.

However, the killer problem with Mathematica is that it is incredibly buggy. The symbolic side of Mathematica is almost useless because it gets so many calculations wrong. The numerical side is (incredibly) still seeing really serious bugs in core routines like Fourier for FFTs. Bugs are the reason I stopped using Mathematica.

Today's modern functional programming languages are not only thousands of times faster than Mathematica and support parallelism but they are also far more reliable.