Re: Octave on Reddit

[Jaroslav Hajek]

On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 3:31 PM, GFotios <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> On Sep 29, 2010, at 3:11 PM, Michael Creel wrote:
>
>> 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
>>
>
> I agree with the combo Octave + C++ + MPI. There is really nothing new to
> Reddit, people that like to argue about something never tried (i guess),
> Jaroslav is correct. I implemented and measured the time for the assembly of
> FEM matrices in Python, Python+f2py and Matlab (once upon a time when i was
> choosing my dev environment), and the results were disappointing for
> Python!!! Now that i use Octave a lot i ll show sth similar for a shape
> optimization problem (later in 2010 for those interested). Regarding Octave,
> i would like the interpreter to be faster (say like Scilab's; the same
> simple loop takes 3\times or so longer in Octave unfortunately) (and when i
> m able to do sth about it, i ll).
>

What simple loop? Can you show it?



-- 
RNDr. Jaroslav Hajek, PhD
computing expert & GNU Octave developer
Aeronautical Research and Test Institute (VZLU)
Prague, Czech Republic
url: www.highegg.matfyz.cz