inmysocks Of Doom, Naked KSC
If the last toot wasn't clear enough, matlab is bad. Seriously, it is terrible.
Feb 20, 2017 at 11:18amWeb
Show threadAlex RoseFeb 20, 2017

@inmysocks What's wrong with matlab?

I used to have to do analysis of particle collider data, and I had to use ROOT by CERN, it was literally the worst thing ever. I ended up writing an exporter that would export all the data so I could read it in matlab so I could present it in an actual nice fashion.

I bust out matlab about once every 3 months for solving gamedev problems too.

Show threadinmysocks Of Doom, Naked KSCFeb 20, 2017
@Alexrose matlab doesn't play well with anything, it is very slow compared to anything else I have used. also it is proprietary. R can do everything matlab can and is generally faster and can actually work with other systems, Julia is still new, while it doesn't have a lot of the libraries matlab does it is much faster. In short, matlab only works with matlab and is slower than just about any of the alternatives, and it is expensive. Python and C++ both have libraries that can replace it too.
Show threadinmysocks Of Doom, Naked KSCFeb 20, 2017
@Alexrose and when I say it is slow I mean that for anything even remotely complex C++ has a speed advantage of something like 100x, and with libraries like armadillo it took all of 3 days for me to learn how to switch from matlab to c++ a few years ago. SciPy and NumPy are even easier to learn.
Show threadAlex RoseFeb 20, 2017

@inmysocks I guess you dislike it because you're working with big data? I mostly used to use it for statistical analysis of experiments I'd done (and now use it for things like balancing systems), and obviously.. with small data sets on gigahertz processors, everything is instant.

It's very low barrier to entry, easy to understand, good at manipulating matrices (obvs), great at making pretty graphs to show data, very simple for quickly polyfitting (and other fits) etc.

Show threadinmysocks Of Doom, Naked KSCFeb 20, 2017
@Alexrose It is very good at being an advanced graphing calculator, but it tries to sell itself as a programming language. I used to use it when I was doing research for mesh networks and it would take hours to do a simulation that I can do in c++ in a few minutes, but I had to use matlab because the people I worked with insisted on it. The amount of time lost because of stuff like this has a real cost.