Does it matter what a hammer looks like, as long as it works?
Name:
Anonymous2011-02-09 18:17
>>3
Using Mathetmaica for any scripting is pants-on-head retarded unless you're in desperate need of symbolic math.
As an engineer I prefer MATLAB for anything numerical.
>>8
Then you don't use Lisp for something. Begone, you lying anti-cudder you.
Name:
Anonymous2011-02-09 20:53
I've been using MatLab in trying to compute a definite integral where the inegrand contained a gamma function of complex argument and a modified bessel function of the second kind where both the argument and the order are complex and where the integration is carried out with respect to the order of the bessel, the argument of the gamma function and some other weights. After running into problems due to the fact that MatLab did not handle the complex orders for the modified bessel I tried looking through Matlab exchange to see if anyone had implemented the code. Indeed, one guy claimed that he had done so. I downloaded the code which included calls to a C++ written .dll file. Again the function could deal with the complex order but now was not able to deal with a vector when calculating the integral (Matlab apparently calculates integrals by constructing vectors that it dots with a grid). I had to write a new piece of code using the Matlab exchange code. After leaving the damn thing run for the entire night I got a plot of my integral which contained patches as the code could not generate many pieces of the graphs (i.e. the way it calculated things was so imprecise that many zeros became NaNs). In any case....the graph was still ok as the integral I was computing had some symmetries which I could use to fill the missing patches and realize that some singularities I was afraid of did not exist. Finally i had to prove that the integral along with a sum added to one for some values of the parameters....the imprecision of the code was so much that I kept getting completely different and quite divergent numbers in place of 1!....finally I managed to get some help in Mathematica...the patches have disappeared, the integral sums to 1 and the plots take about 1 hour instead of 11 not to mention that a code which required a few hundred lines was all already implemented very well in Mathematica......I am not sure that MatLab is so bad when it comes to data otherwise people wouldnt be using it as much....but as far as numerical stuff and Maths...my experience was quite concluding.
>>29
And yet one of those comes out of the box with a large amount of functionality for matrix math, signal processing and visualisation and has millions of users, and the other can barely manipulate strings and has been pretty much dead since the eighties. If they wanted to make art, maybe they should have opted for something less post-modern.
>>30
Those come as libraries. CL can manipulate strings as well as Perl with the right libraries and you have various libraries for matrix manipulation which are quite nice to use. A language should be well designed at its core, not just provide useful APIs and fancy syntactic sugar.
>>32
And at it's core MATLAB is better. Include whatever libraries you want, MATLAB is still more useful and you can write scripts in a quarter of the time it would take you otherwise.