Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

MATLAB Programming Contest Winner Announced

Posted by timothy on from the cigars-all-around dept.

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."

3 of 224 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Just how bad is MATLAB? by alphakappa · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    --
    "When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail." - Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
  2. more alternatives to matlab by poincare · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Many have been pointing out alternatives to matlab, so strictly speaking this is 'redundant', but not all have been mentioned:
    • Octave
    • numeric python
    • R (awesome statistical package also does matrix stuff well).
    • Perl Data Language, 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.
  3. Re:not a troll -- MW is more evil than M$ by StarsAreAlsoFire · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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'.