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by letitleak
3626 days ago
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> I don't get why people are still advocating Octave as a Matlab alternative. Because it is the closest thing to a drop in replacement, which is what you need when taking a class or following a tutorial based on MATLAB. Trying to use a different language and follow along is a much more advanced challenge and can be borderline impossible for a MOOC with an autograder or a class with a dusty professor. I wasn't very happy with octave and I wouldn't use it for an independent project.. but I can't say how much of that is the pesky little octave specific bugs and how much is that I wouldn't like MATLAB's syntax when it is perfectly implemented. I suppose I could make the same criticisms of R as much of its frustratingly odd behavior comes from its history in emulating an old proprietary language's syntax.. |
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Well, and I guess it already says enough that I actually had MATLAB installed, but still preferred using Octave.
Just the minor annoyances in MATLAB like it taking probably a minute to start up, being in general really sluggish and having an annoying (read: not particularly bash-like) command-line were already enough to make up for the just as minor compatibility-problems I occasionally had to correct before handing in.
So, at least up until the stuff that you can get to in one semester, the compatibility was pretty good and I only really once had a problem which couldn't be fixed by a simple find+replace.
And in that case, it was actually something where I didn't understand why it didn't work in MATLAB (if I remember correctly, you for some reason couldn't use `hold on/off` with multiple `ezplot`-instructions in it).
So, yeah, I don't think at all that it was Octave-specific bugs bugging you, especially also because the MATLAB-syntax is actually even more annoying than Octave's.