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Re: Octave on Reddit


From: Michael Creel
Subject: Re: Octave on Reddit
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2010 15:11:57 +0200

2010/9/29 Jaroslav Hajek <address@hidden>:
> 2010/9/29 Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso <address@hidden>:
>> It seems a popular news site has picked up Octave's homepage:
>>
>>     
>> http://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/dk61b/free_alternative_to_matlab_check_octave_out/
>>
>> A few months ago, something similar happened:
>>
>>     
>> http://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/c3pqb/ever_wished_you_had_a_matlab_license_octave_is/
>>
>> It's really sad to read the comments, though. Many suggest to use
>> other things instead of Octave, and many others say that Octave is
>> irreparably inferior as compared to Matlab.
>
> I've only read the first one, but it's not that bad. NumPy/SciPy are
> becoming popular, but I suspect those people saying that it has an
> "almost identical syntax" to Matlab have never really used Matlab.
> Anyone who used both knows that the syntax is *way* different compared
> to Octave; and not just the syntax, but the semantics as well (COW vs.
> implicit pointers).
>
> Yes, plotting is slow and not as nice as Matlab's, but it's about the
> best that can be squeezed out of Gnuplot. Regarding computing
> functions, someone only mentioned contourc, but I wonder exactly how
> much slower it is. Etc.
>
> As a summary, there's nothing new, we know all that. It seems to be a
> rule on the web that negative comments are always in broad supply,
> regarding almost anything even if many people like it. In Czech, we
> have a proverb saying that "An empty pot thuds the loudest." ;-)
>
> regards
>
> --
> RNDr. Jaroslav Hajek, PhD
> computing expert & GNU Octave developer
> Aeronautical Research and Test Institute (VZLU)
> Prague, Czech Republic
> url: www.highegg.matfyz.cz
>
>

At my university we have a site licence for Matlab, and last year I
got curious and decided to try it out to see if I was missing
anything. Suffice it to say that my experiment lasted for a week or
two, and after that I happily went back to Octave. Octave with MPI and
a little C++ for bottleneck computations is a winning combination, in
my opinion. I don't think that popularity is necessarily a good
measure of quality - there are a lot of Windows users out there, after
all.
Michael



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