Re: Octave's and Matlab's limitations

[edmund ronald]

On Wed, Nov 21, 2012 at 9:19 PM, Nicholas Jankowski <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 21, 2012 at 2:38 PM, Francesco Potortì <address@hidden>
> wrote:
>>
>> >But, for the purpose of full disclosure, here are the things that
>> >peeve me off the most about this language:
>> [...]
>>
> <wow snip>
>
>> >And even if you *do* want to do numerical analysis, we're having new
>> >contenders like the Julia language which are already being better
>> >designed from the ground up, much better than Matlab ever was, by
>> >people who actually design programming languages professionally.
>>
>> That was said for every language after Fortran, yet very few (or none)
>> have really died.
>
>

If Matlab were legally downloadable for free I think it would eat up
the market. As it stands, frankly I would advise anyone who can afford
to pay for Matlab to just use Matlab, the benefits of strong platform
integration on each platform, GUI builders and tons of documented
toolboxes are very real. I like Octave because it is free and has a
spare design, but let's face it not everyone wants to be an abstemious
digital monk.

Edmund