MATLAB

What does /prog/ think about MATLAB? It's awesome, right?

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.