MATLAB Survey for Mac OS X

gsfprez writes "It's fairly simple: MATLAB wants to know if a Mac OS X port would be worth their while or not. I tell you what, I know a few engineering R&D organizations who'd have to reverse their anti-Mac IT decisions solely based on the idea that MATLAB would be available for Mac OS X because there could finally be high power, yet affordable, Unix machines running it."

Comments

Math S/W

[showboat]

I had to use matlab on Linux (RedHat) in a 2000-level math course last semester. Let me tell you, it wasn't fun. At least, what we had to do required more time and energy figuring out what's what than it should have. Granted, it was low-er level math; granted we didn't go far into the program -- but the thing was strangely designed. It's kinda like ms office: there are things in there that could be improved, interfaces made more consistent, to actually encourage productivity. No?

I did like te console-ish interface of it, but it couldn't do everything you could do graphically, which is why I spent so much time with the poorly documented dialogs (unless it was an incomplete installation, but then not everything was left without help files).

Anyway, another math prof was always talking about running these theoretical experiments on Maple, and suggested that we might need it for a class (didn't turn out to need it, thank God). I searched around and found that it (maple) had quite the vehement dislikers, who, incidentally, suggested free alternatives. It's been more than a semester since that, so I don't remember what they were. Anybody know of any free/open progs that can do the same thing... and maybe a tad more productively?

Re:Math S/W

[Circuit Breaker]

Mathematica from Wolfram Research is far from being free, but is way ahead of MatLab in anything that matters (except market share ...)

Python + Numeric + {Dislin/PyChart/...} do a decent job, much faster and much more flexibly.

Octave supposedly gives Matlab compatibility (never used it myself).

Matlab is more than 20 years old now, and showing it's age and Fortran ancestry (has been showing for at least 10 years). It's good at manipulating 2D matrices and applying some functions to them, but everything else is horribly slow, inefficient and unpleasant. Most of the reason it still dominates its market is that this is what people study with in the university, and later on, no one remembers how to do the Remez Exchange or IIR design procedure, so they go back to good old Matlab.

Re:Math S/W

[PoiBoy]

I firmly disagree that Mathematica is "way ahead" of MatLab (or Gauss), especially when it comes to Matlab's core competencies such as matrix algebra and general-purpose numerical analysis.

Although Mathematica certainly has far better symbolic capabilities, it is slower than molasses for numerical work. Moreover, Mathematica's programming language is terrible.

Finally, even though Mathematica can do symbolic mathematics, for 95% of the mathematics that I do (I have a PhD in economics), a good understanding of algebra, a pencil, and paper provide useful results much more easily than Mathematica.

IMHO, Mathematica is just a bloated piece of crap.