[chollida1]

Cool, despite Julia replacing matlab here, it looks like the biggest loser to Julia's rise might be Octave.

Matlab will always have its proponents, that will use it no matter what, but if Julia keeps encroaching on this territory, I'm not sure where that leaves Ocatve.

To the model discussed in this paper, check out this series of blog posts for more information:

http://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2014/09/forecas...

Essentially the model is a work in progress that is continually updated each quarter. It attempts to model at a macro economic level, the interactions between Banks, consumers, Companies, Governments and households.

Once the model has solved for the general equilibrium of how those 5 agencies interact the model can then be used to "shock" a particular factor, such as interest rates, to determine how this might affect the interaction between these agents.

Its a fairly well respected model, and the fact that the US is one of the few countries to release such a large amount of financial data is one reason why the US is still a leader in economic theory.

[jordigh]

> it looks like the biggest loser to Julia's rise might be Octave.

It's not a competition. Julia is our friend, not a rival to Octave. We're on good terms with their developers. Occasionally we share ideas and patches back and forth when it makes sense. They've asked me for help with their Octave benchmark and I've gladly provided it.

Octave being unnecessary is Octave's ultimate goal. When nobody cares about Matlab, probably nobody will care about Octave either. But as long as people care about Matlab, Octave will be relevant. Or perhaps, in a perfect world, enough people will stop caring about Matlab that Octave can start leading in fixing the biggest stupidities in the programming language (we already do this to some degree, but keep relenting and replicating Matlab's bugs because code depends on those bugs).

If Julia is gaining the minds of people in scientific computing, great. It's going to take them away from Matlab and Octave to equal degree. If we can all do our computing unfettered by proprietary licenses, I don't care if it means we end up using Octave or Julia as long as we stop using Matlab.

And many of Matlab's alleged proponents keep turning to Octave. Octave still fills a niche that Julia does not: being able to use Matlab code freely.

[placeybordeaux]

It's good to see people that have a goal beyond wanting their personal project to succeed, but rather to keep the original reason they started the project at the for front.

Too often large enterprises and projects forget the reason they were started and simply try to keep themselves relevant.

[jordigh]

Well, Octave wasn't started with the goal to take down Matlab. That became a goal later in the project's lifetime as it became clear that users were demanding it.

[jostmey]

Just thought you might like to hear this---I love octave and use it regularly in my academic work. It is the perfect language for me to rapidly prototype out a calculation.

That said, I think the future lies in porting over octave libraries and plotting capabilities to Julia.

[oneJob]

Respectfully, maybe it should be a (friendly) competition. Competition motivates people. It's commonly accepted as one of the central drivers of capitalist markets. Perhaps if competition were injected in open source projects in some form it'd help the open source community compete with the proprietary community.

[jordigh]

We already have fearsome competition: Matlab. We don't need in-fighting within team Free Software.

[oneJob]

Respectfully disagree with the phrase "infighting". I believe healthy competition would be good for OSS.

[jordigh]

You're applying a broad principle (competition is good) without considering lots of specifics.

First of all, within free software, collaboration is a lot easier than competition. Sure, we should all try to be the best we can be, but if our "competition" is also free, we can just grab their stuff and re-use it. We cannot, however, grab whatever we want from Matlab and re-use it, so we do have to compete against them.

Secondly, even if I agree with you that competition is great even in this case, how do you want me to modify my behaviour? To stop collaborating with Julia? To view them with more suspicion? To refuse to help them when they ask for help?

I already try to match features whenever possible. The feature I'm most envious of is their JIT compiling, but it's very difficult to implement this. Vice versa, I don't think they have a goal to match our features, such as a native Qt GUI or an exact implementation of the Matlab language.

Julia and Octave have lots of ideological differences too. For one, Octave is a GNU package, so it tries to adhere to the GNU coding standards and ideals. In particular, we prefer to call ourselves free software, not open source, even if both terms mean the same thing. I think the most important thing is to enable unfettered scientific computing. Julia's main goal is to provide a better language for scientific computing, while ensuring user freedom is a secondary goal. So far they have not compromised user freedom, and I hope they never do. So, there you have it, we're already competing on something?

[oneJob]

Hmm. Sigh.

It is frustrating and saddening how often I encounter the same broken assumptions and nonconstructive disagreement on HN. I'm beginning to disengage.

I have considered many of the specifics, but yes, I was applying a broad principle in a broad manner, because it has broadly been shown to be beneficial. Even in child play, competition is good. When two children play one will almost always have an advantage relevant to the game at hand, and so the "winning" child must learn to temper their play while the "losing" child must learn to lose beneficially. When the Petronas Towers were being built the teams were placed in competition, with rewards at stake, to complete their tower first. This helped keep the project moving forward at a fast clip. Militaries of different sovereign states participate in "war games" to foster their relationships all the time. Both Russia and China have been invited to participate in the RIMPAC war games, for instance. So, if the idea of friendly competition holds for childhood development, construction, and war, I'd say it holds fairly broadly.

I'm not going to bother getting into the remaining details of your response, because you honestly don't seem open to the discussion. I've got about a 1000 things requiring my attention and energy, and so I try to prioritize those that don't require me beating my head against a wall in vain. But, as a purely "release of stress" exercise, I'd like to point out that OSS is getting its butt kicked in the consumer market. It's getting it's but kicked by proprietary software and software as a service, which is hardly unequivocally empowering to the user, which is one of the most important components of OSS. So, you hate me, you disagree with me, whatever; if you give one flying fuck about OSS, put your ego aside for one short second and realize that OSS is losing to proprietary software and enabling software as a service unabated, while always getting the scraps from the table. Stop with the cognitive dissonance already and do something about it.

[CptMouse]

As someone forced to do matlab/octacve in college, this is incredibly refreshing to hear. My respect for the octave team just went up considerably.

[josu]

This is an anecdote about a big Matlab proponent who switched sides.

I learned Matlab from my Econ 101 professor 8 years ago. He was a big Matlab proponent, and he knew all the econ tools inside out.

We kept in touch, since he has been one of the best professors I've ever had. So, fast forward to 2 years ago, I sent him an email asking about this [1] Quantitative Economics course by Sargent and Stachurski based on python. He told me that it looked interesting and that he would give it a try and tell me what he thought. This was his first approach to Python.

Two months later he sends me an email telling me that he's ditched Matlab for good, he's taken a couple MOOC python courses and that he is having a lot of fun with Python. He also praised the community and all the open source tools. He also told me to get away from the Sargent and Stachurski course, that they add too much complexity to the explanations just for the sake of looking more Nobel-prize-winner like.

[1] http://quant-econ.net/

[otoburb]

>>He also told me to get away from the Sargent and Stachurski course, that they add too much complexity to the explanations just for the sake of looking more Nobel-prize-winner like.

That's really good feedback for anybody thinking of attempting that course. Does your professor recommend an accompanying course to Sargent and Stachurski's quantitative economics course? I haven't seen many other courses that provide code fragments to run, so S&S's course still has a lot going for it in that regard.

[josu]

Nope, I'm sorry, he just told me that I should get into Python. He did recommend this edX course, but it's an introduction to Python, nothing to do with economics.

[1] https://www.edx.org/course/mitx/mitx-6-00-1x-introduction-co...

[RockyMcNuts]

IMF course looks interesting https://www.edx.org/course/macroeconomic-forecasting-imfx-mf...

Sargent course looks pretty intense. IMF course looks maybe more approachable, uses Eviews which is a time-series-oriented statistical modeling package.

[wyager]

> Matlab will always have its proponents

I honestly can't understand why. I'm currently in a computer vision class that uses Matlab, and it's literally the worst language I've ever used in my life. The design is nonsensical, bordering on malicious

I've always thought that the biggest problem with python was that as programs get bigger, you're likely to run into some confusion due to the lack of static typing and substantial use of implicit conversion (e.g. "Truthy" and "falsy" values), but python has nothing at all on Matlab.

Just last night, a matrix I constructed using the expression "[x, y, (x+scale), (y+scale)]" inexplicably had dimensions 1x8 instead of the visually obvious 1x4, but only after a few hours of matlab slowly evaluating this expression thousands of times without any trouble. I suspect this has something to do with matlab's horrible ambiguous matrix concatenation syntax.

[kohanz]

> I honestly can't understand why

The answer is fairly obvious though, isn't it? For scientists or novice programmers wanting to do some numerically intensive work, Matlab has typically offered one of the quickest (in time-to-solution) prototyping platforms. One of the keys being that you can get started very quickly, with minimal setup (besides the expensive license and installation, something most academics need not worry about). As a former academic programmer and now a consultant that helps companies commercialize such prototypes, I understand your pain, but at the same time I completely understand why a physicist, imaging scientist, or finance major ends up using Matlab over something like C++ or Python. Same goes for LabView, and if you despise Matlab, I challenge you to give LabView a whirl. The gap between the Matlabs and Labviews of the world and the other programming languages is closing in terms of ease of use and setup time, but we're not there yet and also momentum shifts on this type of thing take a loooong time. If you come into a lab and are working on a research project that was started in Matlab, odds are, in the interest of finishing your thesis on time, you're unlikely to port it to another language, even if you have the skill to do so.

[nine_k]

If you single-handedly list Python and C++ together, Matlab should have some ridiculously low entry barrier. I can remember a few other horrible tools that saw widespread use exactly because of that, e.g. Basic and PHP3/4.

Corollary: if you are offered a tool highly praised for its being exceptionally easy for beginners, think about the price the tool had to pay in other departments, and how will it affect you in 6-12 months of use.

[lfowles]

> If you single-handedly list Python and C++ together, Matlab should have some ridiculously low entry barrier.

The ridiculously low entry barrier exists wrt importing data and plotting/displaying results.

[boxy310]

These are the same case-uses as Excel and Access, and these also end up bloating in size and becoming unmanageable. The problem is that the selection criteria that lead to using Matlab in the first place also lead to never paying down technical debt.

[krapht]

Libraries. Inertia. The IDE is actually far more polished than Spyder. It makes things easier for non-programmers with many wizards, and excellent help files. The toolboxes are uniformly fairly high quality. I should mention again the help files. Matlab documentation is comprehensive and far better than any of its competitors.

There are many research institutions and workplaces where the cost of the tool isn't really thought about at all. In fact, the cost of Matlab and toolbox fees is a small fraction of a senior scientist/engineer's total compensation.

The main competitor is Python. However, using a general purpose programming language is often too hard for non-programming oriented scientists. They are not able to compile a Python package on Windows, never mind actually package and distribute their work to colleagues. On Windows, if the package isn't in one of the distributions like Anaconda, it may as well not exist.

[baldfat]

> The main competitor is Python

I would say that it really is R. Python while a good choice is a fraction of the size of R and R as a domain specific language excels in its own realm.

Using R with RStudio and sticking with Hadley Wickham universe with Functional Programming makes R shine. There is a reason why so many companies invest in R.

[krapht]

I think your perspective is too small. R is a DSL for data and statistics. Matlab is used in academia and industry across all engineering disciplines, where data and statistics is but a small subset of its total capabilities.

You will never be able to use R to model a Kalman filter, calculate stresses in a beam, or simulate engine control logic.

I refer you to Matlab's toolbox list. http://www.mathworks.com/products/

[mikeskim]

You can do all of those things in R except maybe Simulink with a GUI (at least not yet, maybe soon?), and you have the choice of working with multiple implementations. https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/FKF/FKF.pdf https://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-devel/library/stats/html/Kal... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1738087/what-can-matlab-d... Unless you are doing something very specific and require a specific toolbox only for Matlab, you're better off just using R (or Python).

[krapht]

I can't disagree more with a blanket statement like that. I would never recommend Python / R to the physicists and scientists that I work with. They don't know how to program well. The code they put out is usually garbage, hard to read, and fragile. Software development is not something they do. Backing up for them is emailing themselves a .zip file of their work and revision control is saving their DocXs and PPTs with different dates in the filename.

My point is, coding is not something they enjoy, or care about, it's just a means to an end. The environment and tooling around R/Python still cannot compare to Matlab in terms of ease of use, for the things that Mathworks (creators of Matlab) care enough about to write a toolbox or gui wizard for. The value is not in the language, or syntax, but in the libraries and tooling. I don't know a single Matlab user who doesn't make heavy use of the toolboxes Matlab sells.

And this is why I believe Matlab is not going to go away. If being free and flexible was all that mattered, Linux would have arrived on the desktop already.

[Hansi]

Sorry you are wrong especially about your first example. For the other two yes there aren't built in toolboxes to handle those but it can be done. R has a lot of packages + it's a language so anyone can effectively write anything: https://cran.r-project.org/web/views/

[krapht]

I can write anything to do any computation in any programming language. The whole point is that there are pre-existing, high quality libraries and toolboxes to do these operations. In fact, that is exactly why R is popular - it has excellent libraries for handling data and statistics.

You're right. R does in fact have a library for modeling Kalman filters. My mistake! Let me pick any other example from the Matlab toolbox product list that R doesn't have! Can you model a radar system in R? Can you tune PID systems in R interactively? Don't be a pedant. Since you are familiar with R, you should know R is 95% used by data scientists and others involved in statistical work.

[nkassis]

"There are many research institutions and workplaces where the cost of the tool isn't really thought about at all. In fact, the cost of Matlab and toolbox fees is a small fraction of a senior scientist/engineer's total compensation."

Yeah that's my experience with my current job. Matlab licenses aren't an issue. Also many people have Bloomberg terminals and other expensive tools of that trade that make Matlab look fairly cheap in comparison.

For a language to beat out Matlab it will need to be based on other factors than cost. Most likely performance, documentation, training, tooling and be popular within the pool of candidates for jobs. Hopefully Julia can get there.

[jordigh]

> For a language to beat out Matlab it will need to be based on other factors than cost.

There are plenty of cases in which Matlab's cost is a big factor. Maybe not at your company, but some of Octave's most ardent paying customers have been those disgruntled with Matlab's price tag.

[Coding_Cat]

if scale is a vector say [1, 2, 3] then x+scale = [1+x, 2+x, 3+x], and in Matlab [ [1,2,3], 4] = [1, 2, 3, 4].

I agree with all you said mind you, and could rant even more about Matlab, just giving a possible explanation for how Matlab parses the expression.

[aswanson]

Why? Because professors keep assigning students problems with it, immune to its high cost and suspect coding idioms because they aren't professional programmers.

[grayclhn]

As (potentially) one of those professors, I'm going to suggest that if you're posting on HN, you have no idea how little computer experience some of the Econ, engineering, etc. students have. Matlab and other programs like it try hard to smooth over some of the rough edges that can trip up complete novices. As long as the main focus of the class is teaching "something other than programming" that's going to be pretty attractive.

[aswanson]

I was one of those clueless engineering undergrads back in ancient times...I know the mentality of thinking since you know BASIC and can code up a brutally ugly solution in MATLAB that you know programming, as long as the right number is spit out on the command line. I also know, in my old age, that if the purpose of an engineering education is is about building higher order structures that can communicate intent and be extensible artifacts, that this is not acceptable. We need to put in place tools and methodologies that enforce good practice with code in the same way that we enforce good spelling, grammar, sentence, and paragraph structure in language, from the beginning.

[grayclhn]

I agree with you, but that's not a decision that can be made unilaterally by professors at the course level without sacrificing _a lot_ of the other content.

You're going to cry if you see the current standards of undergraduate spelling, grammar, and sentence structure, btw. :)

[aswanson]

Touche, Prof. Carry on. ;)

[GFK_of_xmaspast]

It works well enough and there's an incredible amount of infrastructure behind it. It's an academic's job to produce research, not code.

[bachmeier]

That was the advice I got from my advisor as a grad student. 15 years later, I disagree strongly. I wasted a lot of time writing code that I couldn't read later, that took forever to get right, and that couldn't be reused. I've made a significant investment in programming tools and it has been worth it. Git alone has probably made me twice as productive.

The logic you state (which is dominant) is wrong. Optimizing the speed of writing the first version of a particular piece of code is a bad idea.

[nine_k]

* Don't unreliable tools impede research?

* Isn't it a good idea to publish code used to produce the results so as to help fellow scientists verify the results and methods?

[GFK_of_xmaspast]

1. Who said matlab was unreliable? (There's a difference between "reliable" and "good")

2. Matlab code gets published all the time.

3. Just because it's not matlab doesn't mean that it's, for example, in a state others can use. See for example: http://reproducibility.cs.arizona.edu/v2/index.html (which isn't perfect, but it's something)