MATLAB Programming Contest Winner Announced

gooru writes "The MATLAB programming contest winner has been announced. It is a semi-annual programming contest organized by the MathWorks. What makes the contest truly interesting is the final phase is open source. Contestants may submit as many entries as they want and can tweak other entries."

Just how bad is MATLAB?

[Anonymous Coward]

Since we're talking about a *programming* contest MATLAB, just how horrible a programming language is it? I've been told that MATLAB's sole value lies in its large suite of libraries, because as a language it borders on the God-Awful. Some real horror stories: no true local variables, until recently each function had to reside in its own file, no way to create cyclic references (!!!) (resulting in only reference counting for GC or something), no general-purpose objects, much less notions like OOP, closures, and the like. The phrase "it makes FORTRAN look advanced" came up. Can someone elaborate?

MATLAB is cool

[Radio Shack Robot]

I am an EE. At first I hated Matlab, because it's totaly matrix based, nothing like Fortran. But after actually implementing DSP techniques, I came to love MATLAB.

Re:Just how bad is MATLAB?

[alphakappa]

You have dissed the language while it is amply clear that you have never used it. However let me clear this up - Matlab may not have the advanced features of c/c++, but it is designed to be a prototyping language - something that will help you test your algorithms fast. You can write code that will solve your differential equations, or do some signal processing with just a few lines - working with matrices becomes extremely simple since you don't have to worry about coding the intricacies of matrix manipulation. It makes FORTRAN look retarded as far as usability and speed of coding goes. It is definitely not as fast as programs created in C/FORTRAN, but it's not the speed of the code that's the objective here -it's how fast you can write up some code.

more alternatives to matlab

[poincare]

Many have been pointing out alternatives to matlab, so strictly speaking this is 'redundant', but not all have been mentioned:

• Octave [wikipedia.org]
• numeric python [wikipedia.org]
• R [wikipedia.org] (awesome statistical package also does matrix stuff well).
• Perl Data Language [wikipedia.org], commonly used by astronomers, much like the rest of perl in that it's difficult to wrap ones head around but capable of extremely powerful (i.e. terse) code.

I don't really know that I'd push this

[Sycraft-fu]

Octave doesn't even come close to measuring up to Matlab. I mean don't get me wrong, it's a neat program and it's powerful, but it's not playing in the same league as Matlab.

So why not push it? Well one of the things I know that drives many people away form open source is the feeling that the solutions is offers are half assed. That when you choose an OSS version, sure you get it for free (if you don't need support) but it's going to suck. You'll have to make a bunch of compramises and not be able to do things as easily, or even at all.

That's one of the reasons I like pushing Firefox is it's an example of a great success, something that is at the very least as good as the commercial counterparts, and probably better. You give up nothing for the most part, it really shows OSS shining.

So while you might want to recommend Octave to someone who lacks Matlab but needs a powerful calculator, I wouldn't try and push it as a Matlab alternative for those that use Matlab. You are likely to find that it often doesn't even come close to doing what Matlab can, and that gives a generally bad impression.

If an OSS solutions doesn't measure up to a commercial one, that's fine. Nobody says OSS has to be the best at everything all the time. However if that is the case, don't try to push it as an alternative, unless you are sure that it really will do everything the person wants, and do it just as easy.

Re:not a troll -- MW is more evil than M$

[StarsAreAlsoFire]

read. then reply.

*ADD FEATURES* to Octave. Which already has much of the basics. Not rewrite MATLAB.

Which, really, on a lab-by-lab basis (in that one lab generally will use only 'n' features) you probably COULD rewrite all the code you needed with one or two full time developers.

In 3 years of aerospace engineering classes, I used maybe 10 'special' functions of MATLAB; 4 of which were the ODE related. The rest was 'just math'.