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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."

4 of 224 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Down with MATLAB by Strontium-90 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  2. I Always Write my MATLAB Open Source by schestowitz · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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/

    --
    My Linux - (L)ove (I)s (N)ever (U)tterly eXPensive
  3. not a troll -- MW is more evil than M$ by EccentricAnomaly · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --
    There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
    1. Re:not a troll -- MW is more evil than M$ by nicsterrr · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.