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."

Comments

Be Wary of Conclusions about Programming Contests

[reporter]

Invariably, in contests of this nature, people are apt to draw specious conclusions from the results of the contest. In a recent programming contest involving teams of students from across the globe, the American teams performed poorly. Professor Matloff then rebutted the cries for government intervention to increase the quality and quantity of computer-science students.

Now, this Matlab contest is positioned to lead to the same silly cries. So, allow me to present a link to Professor Matloff's excellent article to head off any silly speculations about the decline of American technical prowess.

TLL280 in 13 seconds?

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess for their speed programming award they are allowed to have prior source. If this wasn't the case, the author would have written it at 393 characters per second!

I'm beginning to wonder if this was rather some sort of PR effort rather than a true programming challenge.

Re:Down with MATLAB

[Strontium-90]

If you're doing symbolic work, then Mathematica is the program to go with. But if you're doing numerical linear algebra and either don't need the speed of C/C++/Fortran or don't want to deal with those languages, it's kind of hard to beat Matlab. One nice combo is Maple/Matlab. Maple can call Matlab for numerical linear algebra work, and Matlab can call Maple for symbolic work.

Despite all of the people who complain about Matlab being unstable and using up resources, I've always found that running the command-line version of Matlab is fast and stable. The GUI version has some nice features, but they usually aren't essential to the work that I do.

I Always Write my MATLAB Open Source

[schestowitz]

All my MATLAB code is Open Source. And I am the most popular author (jointly with Luigi Rosa) this month. http://www.mathworks.nl/matlabcentral/reports/file exchange/top10Authors/

When did Matlab become commercial?

[Asprin]

When I last used Matlab, we used it just for the matrix calculator and, IIRC, it was free. When did it become a commercial product? Did I miss something or was just not paying attention back then?

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

[EccentricAnomaly]

An open source matlab contest is the same animal as if Microsoft held an open source Excel or Visual Basic contest... except that Matlab costs a lot more, and Mathworks tend to be a lot more evil in its licensing terms.

Matlab costs about $3500... but at my work, somehow it costs $70,000 a year because of some weird ass licensing scheme matlworks sticks large government labs with. I've tired to convince my project that for that money it makes more sense just to hire programmers to add whatever features we need to octave and go tell mathworks to fuck themselves.

Oh, and by the way... all of that money is still not enough to get you bug reports noticed. For that you need to pay for some sort of premiere program.

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

[nicsterrr]

It's even worse than this.. The origins of Mathworks was an open source system created by an academic and improved by other contributors.

One day a business man came along and convinced the creator to leave academia in order to exploit his open source creation by closing the source and selling it to existing users.

Ten years later, Mathworks is a semi-monopoly in numeric computing in academia.