[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
Re: Octave advocacy
From: |
Mike Miller |
Subject: |
Re: Octave advocacy |
Date: |
Fri, 17 Sep 2004 00:16:56 -0500 (CDT) |
On Thu, 16 Sep 2004, John W. Eaton wrote:
The following message was posted to sci.math.num-analysis today.
From: rif <address@hidden>
This is Rif: http://five-percent-nation.mit.edu/PersonalPages/rif/
Subject: Re: best software environment for numerical analysis
Newsgroups: sci.math.num-analysis
Date: 16 Sep 2004 14:42:23 -0400
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
I prefer R, which is the successor of S.
It's not "the successor of S." It is an open-source language and
environment that was designed to work very much like S or S-Plus.
It's free (beer and freedom), has much better graphics than Octave, has
a good high-level control language, and has a huge array of software
available.
I do like R graphics. Apparently, the graphics routines are built into R
and R does not call gnuplot. Octave has "a huge array of software"
available too.
It was designed with statistics in mind, but is extremely useful for a
wide range of numerical tasks.
I prefer Octave for my numerical work, but maybe that is partly because I
*know* Octave much better than I know R. I'll tell you one thing. I can
do things like this in Octave...
echo 'sqrt(29)' | octave -q
...and more elaborate things, and I do so dozens of times per day. I
don't know if R can do that kind of thing for me.
(IMO, the only time Octave is really a good choice is if you have to run
existing Matlab, and even then, it rarely works, as Octave is missing
many of Matlab's features.)
I can't respond to that except by saying that it doesn't match my
experience, not at all.
R and Octave are being used by different groups of people. R is designed
for statistical analysis and it is being used very heavily by
statisticians. Octave seems to be favored by engineers and some physical
scientists. I expect that there are many more people using one or the
other of the two programs, but not as many people use both. It's funny
what happens next. People who use primarily one of the two will become
quite certain that the program they use is superior in particular ways to
the one they do not use, but this is only because they don't know the
features of the other program! I see this frequently with emacs v. vi or
with bash v. tcsh.
For me, the world is best with both R and Octave. I intend to make more
use of R in the coming months and I recently bought the GNU manuals for R
and Octave on Amazon.com. I am encouraging students to learn R and to
avoid SAS. I just got back from a scientific meeting (genetic
epidemiology) where I presented results of work done in Octave. Octave
performed amazingly well on my PC under Cygwin - everyone was very
impressed with the speed with which it performed my simulations. It
really surprised me though I use it all the time.
Mike
--
Michael B. Miller, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Division of Epidemiology and Community Health
and Institute of Human Genetics
University of Minnesota
http://taxa.epi.umn.edu/~mbmiller/
-------------------------------------------------------------
Octave is freely available under the terms of the GNU GPL.
Octave's home on the web: http://www.octave.org
How to fund new projects: http://www.octave.org/funding.html
Subscription information: http://www.octave.org/archive.html
-------------------------------------------------------------
Re: Octave advocacy, Quentin Spencer, 2004/09/17