[std_throwawayay]

GNU/Octave has a great strength and weakness that it uses the Matlab language. This is great for many who are educated with Matlab but don't know much else. After some time I found Python and the ecosystem around numpy/scipy/matplotlib fit my problems much better. Python just much more flexible and better suited for general programming tasks than that weird matrix oriented language.

Why should anyone use Octave over Matlab?

- Licensing cost.

- Freedom.

Why should anyone learn Octave instead of Python?

- It's a bit easier to get started for scientists who are not programmers.

- If you mostly do vector/matrix math, the language is nice.

- Otherwise I don't know any good point.

All in all I like a free alternative to Matlab but have the feeling that most people are just better served by joining the much bigger Python ecosystem. (Or maybe R/Julia/Rust which I don't know so much about in this context.)

[adrianratnapala]

I used Octave in Uni when my assignments had to be done in (commercial) MATLAB. I could get most of the code working at home, and then port. Matlab compatibility was the key benefit, even though the MATLAB language is a bit stupid.

And that was before numerical python existed. Now, MATLAB compatibility is about the only reason to use Octave. But a better idea is to get out of the MATLABiverse altogether.

As for reasons to use Matlab:

Matlab comes with XYZ toolkit: This isactually a good reason if you know that XYZ toolkit is your core business. In general though, the Python ecosystem is far bigger that Matlab's one.

Easy for scientist: Trap. Every MATLAB using scientist I know ends up with a code base that is too complex (~1000-5000 lines of code) for the language, but is perfect for Python. (Exactly like how programmers start projects with Python that then grow too big for that language).

Admittedly falling into the trap once might be cheaper than learning Python, assuming you never need to program anything again in your life.

Vector/matrix math: Numpy has all the same vector/matrix stuff including a class which does matrix-multiply under that '* ' operator like MATLAB. But that tMatlabhat operator is a trap: '.* ' is far more common in MATLAB code and accidentally using '* ' is a common bug. This is effortlessly avoided in Numpy standard classes.

[microtherion]

> Every MATLAB using scientist I know ends up with a code base that is too complex (~1000-5000 lines of code) for the language, but is perfect for Python.

Exactly! And I feel R has a similar problem.

[pvitz]

My experience with this is that it is not the necessarily the language that makes it too complex, but the lack of training in proper software development. I have got mainly colleagues who were trained as economists, actuaries or mathematicians using Python, R, Matlab or Excel/VBA as the language of their choice and the result is always the same.

Coming from physics myself,I understand that beautiful notation can make things much easier and can be often the way to find great solutions, but proper organization will most often be sufficient.

[roenxi]

Base R has some pretty big problems compared to Python or VBA. I'll single out the increasingly desperate attempts made to implement a map function in the *apply() function family; one of a number of key functions that from a user perspective return data in a random data structure. It is unreasonably difficult to maintain control over what the type of your object is.

Say m[1:2,] where "m" is a matrix. That returns a matrix. m[1,] returns something that is not a matrix. That sort of type soup breaks all sorts of things in an unhelpful manner. typeof(m[var,]) and class(m[var,]) don't reveal any information on the subject either. You need to explicitly test if you still have a matrix with is.matrix after accessing a sub-matrix of a matrix in the obvious fashion. That is an important operation. Good luck figuring that out if you don't already know what is going on; the design is awful.

The short story is to go install tidyverse and use that instead.

[radford-neal]

Yes, there are problems of this nature in R, but I don't think the specific case you cite is really a problem. The ultimate source of the difficulty is the R (really S) decision to not have scalars - only vectors that happen to have length one. But given that, writing m[1,] is normally intended to get a simple vector, not a matrix.

The problem really arises when you write m[1:n,] with the intent of getting a matrix with n rows, and n happens to be 1 at the moment, so you get a simple vector instead.

This is a problem that I have addressed in my pqR version of R, available at pqR-project.org.

In pqR, there is a new sequence operator, .., which produces a 1D array, not a simple vector. And in pqR, when a 1D array is used as an index, the dimension is not dropped, even if the array happens to be of length 1. So m[1..n,] produces a matrix even if n is one.

Well, most of the time. There's also the problem that m might have only one column, so the result will get dropped down to a simple vector for that reason. To solve this, pqR has a new way of indicating a missing argument, with _, which also indicates that you don't want the dimension dropped. So you can now get exactly the behaviour desired by writing m[1..n,_].

This is all backwards compatible, except that it's necessary to disallow use of .. in the middle of an identifier, so that a..b won't be taken as the name of a variable.

[thom]

Ah, I've been intrigued by pqR. Lately I've wondered if there couldn't be a version of dplyr implemented as transducers, if only R... wasn't R. How feasible might it be for some future R runtime to be truly multithreaded, even if it breaks some existing functionality?

[ekianjo]

In 2019 its hard to find people who only use BaseR to be fair...

[vhhn]

m[x,] is for interactive use

If you write a function and need stable behavior use m[x,, drop = FALSE]. Problem solved.

No need of tideverse (which comes with its own surprises).

[thom]

I think this point has great merit. From time to time I sit on the industrial relations board of our local university's CS department and I begged to have at least one basic software engineering best practice module as part of their new data science degree, with no luck. Many universities have Research Software Engineering departments now who can help with this stuff, but on the whole code produced by non-CS academics is dross (but honestly god bless you if you're offended by this characterisation and it doesn't apply to you).

[adrianratnapala]

> My experience with this is that it is not the necessarily the language that makes it too complex

It's not that the language makes the project complex. It's that the projects are by a bit more complex than the language is cut out for.

> but the lack of training in proper software development...

Assuming training scientists etc. in proper software development is a good use of their time (it might be); then MATLAB is a blocker because it makes it hard/ugly to implement "proper" techniques.

Again Python fits the bill here, because its a pretty good language for novices to hack around naively in, while scaling smoothly to projects 5-10 times more complex. So that the naïf has some headroom.

[lincpa]

I used Clojure to manipulate the data, construct the system, think of R as a library of data analysis and data visualization, use DSL to call R, take the professional advantages of R, avoid the shortcomings of R.

Let professional language do professional things, and the advantages of various languages complement each other.

[thom]

Dunno if you're aware of Bayadera[1], but if you happen to like a Bayesian workflow and don't rely overmuch on ggplot2 niceness, you can actually go a whole day without touching R.

1: https://github.com/uncomplicate/bayadera

[ekianjo]

R is actually a lot more concise than Python for a number of operations. Python wins when you consider the total ecosystem, but doing a broad comparison like that is unfair. it depends completely on what you are trying to achieve.

[thom]

R has better data manipulation, algorithm support (outside of neural networks) and visualisation. Speaking as someone who has to maintain environments for a team of data scientists, getting R and RStudio Server installed with Intel MKL support etc is trivially easy. Getting JupyterHub, Python, Anaconda and your own compile of TensorFlow all up and running is _excruciating_ so I don't really buy that one ecosystem is provably better than another even if I think R is a horrible language in comparison).

[thom]

The best I can explain it is that R is to data science as PHP is to web sites. It's an incredibly productive and accessible DSL, but you rarely want to inherit an R codebase.

[enriquto]

> And that was before numerical python existed. Now, MATLAB compatibility is about the only reason to use Octave. But a better idea is to get out of the MATLABiverse altogether.

Personally, I do a lot of numerical calculus and prefer octave than numpy, just because the language is less verbose and more comfortable to use. I have converted many times ugly python+numpy code into beautiful octave. If your main and only goal is to perform matrix computations, then octave is excellent. I have never used nor needed the commercial matlab.

The python numerical stack has a rather absurd feeling in my eyes.

[TickleSteve]

In an engineering setting, MatLab has more mindshare, but that may be changing.

The related product Simulink is not uncommon in larger engineering firms also.

Back in the day, the community around MatLab was quite large, but likely has declined in size in the last few years with the rise of Python in this area.

[ryl00]

"Not uncommon" is an understatement. In some workplaces, Simulink is as pervasive and core to engineering as Excel is to the business world in general.

[dtech]

> In an engineering setting, MatLab has more mindshare, but that may be changing.

This has definitely been changing for a while. All engineering studies of my old university except for computer science and mathematics have switched from Java+Matlab to Python over the last years. I've already seen this have an effect on workplaces, where new students prefer to use Python and are generally allowed to.

[speedplane]

> All engineering studies of my old university except for computer science and mathematics have switched from Java+Matlab to Python over the last years

I'd love to witness this. I used Matlab heavily as an engineering student, and now mostly work in Python. Python is definitely better for complex programming, but where the program is simple and the math is hard, Matlab seems like a great tool.

I'm curious what tools/libraries python users now use that brings Python up to the usability of matlab?

[dtech]

> I'm curious what tools/libraries python users now use that brings Python up to the usability of matlab?

95% SciPy, NumPy and Spyder. I'm sure the massive savings on license costs also make it attractive.

[speedplane]

> I'm sure the massive savings on license costs also make it attractive.

I remember shelling out $60 for a true license of Matlab while in college. I remember thinking, "well you're an engineer now, and this cost is part of that", even thugh it felt like a small fortune. But official licensed version required you to insert the CD into the computer every time you used it, so I gave up a got the pirated version instead.

[4thaccount]

Lol $60

If you get the commercial version out of college it is thousands of dollars for base and thousands for each "toolbox". Want to have database functionality? Thousands of dollars, optimization functions? Thousands of dollars.

That might be worth it for national labs that like how the native IDE, plotting, GUI, widgets, ability to put into commercial projects (they've secured licensing for the math solvers for you)...etc. It is all better integrated than Python even with it's nice Spyder IDE.

[nrclark]

Out of curiosity, do you know of a Simulink equivalent that works with Octave? Or anything close?

[satish-setty]

Not Octave, but the other Matlab-clone Scilab has a package called Xcos which is similar to Simulink.

[4thaccount]

Octave strives to be 1:1 with Matlab, while Scilab aims to be close to 1:1. A subtle distinction there :)

[rct42]

I find that I'm more productive prototyping algorithms in Matlab than in Python. In fact, I tend to write it first in Matlab, port it to Python, and finally port it to C (to run on an embedded device)!

As for Octave, I've used it a couple times in the past but found the environment underwhelming (especially so when creating plots). I also tend to run into various compatibility problems when running scripts developed in Matlab.

[grwilliams]

I've used Octave and the Python stack and I can confirm that it is much easier to focus on the problem at hand using Octave. One can focus on the math and algorithms and not the language.

It is the same for me with R vs. the Python equivalents.

So your strategy of designing in Matlab and porting later (if necessary) makes a lot of sense.

[4thaccount]

Ever try MicroPython for embedding?

[rct42]

I haven't used MicroPython and suspect it wouldn't suit my use case. I often have to design things that run on battery power (sometimes a CR2025) and so the firmware needs to be quite lean. Also most of the time is typically spent interfacing to hardware and peripherals so using something other than C wouldn't make sense.

[4thaccount]

Gotcha. At that level I guess your only options are Assembly, C, or FORTH.

[patrec]

Matlab is much nicer to use than python for problems that fall well into its (much narrower) niche. It's super easy to bash some matrices together with nice syntax, plot the results and interactively and iteratively develop code. Profiling python kinda sucks, whereas in matlab the IDE will color code each line of code based on profile information. Reloading python code sucks, whereas in matlab you just change a function file and the modified definition becomes immediately available in your interactive session. Everything is much simpler and more immediate (and of course also more limiting, if you want to do some general purpose software engineering). It also used to be significantly more performant than python for many important tasks (and maybe still is).

Octave, on the other hand is IMO really only of interest if you somehow need some degree of compatibility with the Matlab ecosystem or want to teach non-programmers how to do some basic numerical linear algebra stuff. Otherwise, if you want something free, just stick with python.

[marmaduke]

Python has line_profiler which works quite well. It’s not part of the standard distribution but easy enough to install.

[patrec]

I've used both. I've also used ipython's autoreload functionality with various custom tweaks etc. In both cases the experience was much inferior.

[knbknb]

Matlab has lots of solvers for all types of families of differential equations. I think these are lacking (in their completeness and richness of documentation) in other programming languages ( at least this holds for R - much fewer solvers). I don't know how complete the Octave equivalents are.