Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by scottlocklin 2672 days ago
As notation for array based algorithms, Octave/Matlab is vastly better than anything else I've found. Some guy did PRML in Matlab, others have done it in Python. The Matlab version is like reading a book; clear, concise, correct.

https://github.com/locklin/PRMLT

IMO for most people, for array based algos, Matlab hits the "notation as thought" Iverson saying in a way that APL didn't quite make it.

1 comments

For such things, Julia is often very close to Matlab indeed, or at least it can be used that way.

You could translate most of those files line-for-line, with quite a few lines identical or trivially changed (bracket shape, or max -> maximum). This is often a useful thing to do, get a transliterated version running, and then re-write bits of it more idiomatically, while checking that the output is identical.

I'd be happy to look at the output of such an exercise. If I were transcribing it, it would either be to J or C. Julia doesn't solve any problems for me.