Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by thanatropism 1022 days ago
I wish there were more serious studies on "Matlab risk". There's a lot on $old_lang risk already, and Excel risk is now a serious thread of research, but many in academia (and very possibly greybeards in industrial R&D) just won't budge from Matlab. So e.g. all the codes from my thesis are in Matlab because my advisor wouldn't Python.

Matlab in theory has OO, but it's very slow and who bothers to verify that? So practically everything is matrices and there's very little "semantic expressed in code itself" (to paint issues with a broad brush). Also matrix calculations can get botched numerically, particularly matrix exponentials, but the whole culture (that I can't even expunge from my own thinking) is that I have a theorem so tests schmests.
4 comments
Q6T46nT668w6i3m 1022 days ago
There’s been numerous articles in nearly every field of science about this!
link
cozzyd 1021 days ago
Matlab is great for a lot of things, though it's not really a great general purpose language. Its main problem is that it's not free (though octave exists, obviously), which limits interoperability. Octave can trivially be embedded in C++ and Python; if it was easier to do that with Matlab I wonder if numpy would have ever existed...(after all, numpy is essentially a port of Matlab semantics to Python... most Python numeric programmers are unwittingly basically writing Matlab already...).
link
TheRealKing 1021 days ago
This process of language love and hatred over a short period is what's called language fad. Ten years ago, people wrote articles praising MATLAB over established languages. I do not recall any of those writings ever mentioning Matlab's licensing as an issue. MATLAB is now >1000 fold better than ten years ago. Yet, the new generation throws it under the bus daily because it's not their favorite. Change is the only constant in the world of programing fashion and language fads.
link
zild3d 1022 days ago
matlab is incredible for "I have some data, I want do a bunch of calculations and then spit out nice plots". It's why matplotlib is a thing. But not at all well suited for OO / building larger software applications / CI & testing, which is partially at least why the former is the case
link
actinium226 1021 days ago
Underperformance in OO is not why MATLAB is problematic.
link