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MATLAB Survey for Mac OS X

Posted by pudge on from the if-i-were-a-mathematician-yadda-dadda-dadda dept.

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."

4 of 48 comments (clear)

  1. Octave by DustMagnet · · Score: 4, Informative

    There's always the open source alternative called Octave. It doesn't even require a license server, something I hate about matlab.

    --
    'SBEMAIL!' is better than a goat!!
  2. Re:Could someone confirm this survey's legitimacy? by mkoz · · Score: 5, Informative

    It is also posted on MacNN:

    http://osx.macnn.com/news.php?id=13863

  3. Re:Wonderful by softsign · · Score: 3, Informative
    You can get Matlab for Linux - I run copies on RedHat - so the implication of the post that Matlab for Mac OS X would finally bring Matlab to Unix is a little strong.
    You can get Matlab for just about any Unix (and it will run fine on a $1000 Sun Netra). So the implication by Mathworks that it would be difficult is bogus. Releasing a port that uses X would probably take them about one month. Using Aqua would probably take some more time. But with the rate of OS X adoption among engineers, they would be stupid not to pursue this.
  4. Re:Math S/W by b_pretender · · Score: 5, Informative
    Comparing MATLAB to Mathematica is like comparing apples to oranges.

    Mathematica offers a great symbolic algebra tool, a functional scripting language, a good plotting data visualization tools.

    MATLAB offers a great procedural scripting language, awesome array/matrix handling, and good plotting data visualization tools. Although, overall, MATLAB scripts run very slowly, when it comes to array/image manipulations, our best coders couldn't write C code that would perform as quickly as a well-written MATLAB script.

    I have extensive educational experience with Mathematica and extensive proffesional experience with MATLAB. One is good for some things the other is good for other things. For basic math projects or assignments, probably either tool is equally good, and tools such as Octave or SigmaPad are effective and free alternatives for MATLAB or Mathematica, respectively.

    MATLAB and Mathematica shine, however, when it comes to toolboxes. At Lockheed Martin, I used the Neural Network and Image Processing toolboxes extensively, and I was very happy with them. Also, MATLAB lends itself nicely to reprogramming your code in C, or using MEX wrappers to program in C or insert C code into MATLAB.

    Although I don't have much experience with Mathematica add-ins (except for the Statistics Toolbox), I imagine that they are also well written and efficient. I would guess that Mathematica would have better *analytical* toolboxes, whereas MATLAB would have better *numerical* toolboxes.