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by enriquto 248 days ago
> The language itself is awful.

As a programming language freak, I must disagree... in what other programming language can you solve a linear system Ax=b in one line

    x = A\b
without any external libraries or imports, just with the base language?

I never used any official matlab "toolbox", but still love the language via the octave interpreter. It's so clean and straightforward!

5 comments

> without any external libraries or imports

Why does this matter in the least? Like you must understand that this is a library call right? Like just put `import numpy as np` in your PYTHONSTARTUP and it's the exact same UX in python.

https://docs.python.org/3/using/cmdline.html#envvar-PYTHONST...

Well, in Julia, for one.
Also APL: b ⌹ A
In Python you can use a library, then it is: x = np.linalg.solve(A, b). But yeah, Octave is nice, because it stays very symbolic.
GNU Maxima.

Not a general purpose one, but good enough.

Also, qalc from libqalculate for trivial stuff.

In R, this is: x <- solve(A, b)