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Comment by omegote | Hacker News Reader

Matlab? Thanks, but no thanks.

It's still widely used in academia (though I'm extremely glad IPython/Jupyter is being praised by Nature[1]), and it has a lot of "toolboxes" with a reasonable integration between them.

Once you step outside it, you need one library for the machine learning part of your project, another one for the computer vision aspects, yet another one for the reading of different data files. When you get to the 20th library you'd need, plus all the classes and wrappers you have to write on your own to achieve the same result, you start looking MATLAB under a softer light. That's even more for those who are no programming-inclined.

[1] http://www.nature.com/news/interactive-notebooks-sharing-the...

There's also Octave [0]

[0]: https://www.gnu.org/software/octave/

Matlab vs Octave is one of those places where it's still worth buying the real one. Personal use license (including machine learning toolkit) is under $200. If you're not willing to spend $200 to learn something you're probably not that interested.

Browse JSTOR at the library versus Googling any historical, scientific or research topic and you'll quickly learn that "internet" offers the shitty version of surprisingly many things. (Shh... it's a secret.)

> If you're not willing to spend $200 to learn something you're probably not that interested.

This is a bit presumptuous. I know people for which 200$ is a month's income. If you only consider their disposable income, 200$ would probably take 6 months.

Maybe that's why there's the $49 student license and the $99 one that includes ten toolboxes including machine learning.

I'd agree that Matlab is great and I honestly thought Matlab would be more expensive. I've done Andrew Ng's class, and I learned a great deal from it. Given that I haven't really figured out what I'd like to do with what I learned from the class I'd prefer to stick with the "lite" math package first till I decide to get more serious.

Actually matlab i had great experience learning NN in matlab. It is very fast with matrix multiplication and have comprehensive toolbox set. If you need prototype anything, matlab is your choice.

At times my mechanical engineering courses at university felt like MATLAB tutorials. You had to use it, no way around it. Good luck once you're out of university and want to start your own thing, you won't be able to afford it. The computer science courses in contrast preferred open source tools over proprietary ones.

The guy cutting my lawn spent more on his tools than MATLAB costs.

I also spent more on video games in the last year than it costs. What's your point? That it's so cheap he should just buy it, even if there are better, cheaper tools out there? That seems like a waste to me.

I was refuting this silly argument: "Good luck once you're out of university and want to start your own thing, you won't be able to afford it."

Yup, startups have costs. Go figure. And sometimes you get what you pay for.

I wish I'd learned Matlab sooner. I still love the Python ecosystem, but Matlab's replaced a LOT of dicking around in Python for me. It does completely different things, and certain things are trivial or impossible in each place. Worth learning both.

Octave is 'cheaper' but I can't call it 'better'.

Of course it's not only about the price. Open and free tools are important for reproducibility of research, including computer science research, economic research, etc. Having open access articles/papers, we are now moving to open availability of data for reproducibility of results. Open tools are the third component, allowing a complete reproducibility of research, unencumbered by arbitrary lock-in. It is then important that we teach and share open and free tool with science learners, so that as they progress they can freely share fully reproducible research, with anyone in the world.

[edit] in summary, in the age of open access, FLOSS science tools become a must -- and a collective responsibility.

The most important thing is giving brilliant minds the best tools, period.

If those tools make it impossible to share data, or publish results reproducibly, then I'd agree that those tools suck. However Matlab reads and writes every damn format under the sun.

Don't confuse "create, invent and build" with "export and publish." They're fundamentally different tasks.

Student copies start at $99 [0]. Copies for home use start at $145[1]. This is not outrageously expensive. Students can spend more on a single textbook that'll be used for only one semester. For home users, this is the price of 7-10 dinners out.

And as others have pointed out, there's also Gnu Octave, which is reasonably (or used to be) compatible, and free. And where it's not source-compatible, it still largely retains the same semantics and underlying models so knowledge of Matlab can be easily transferred.

[0] http://www.mathworks.com/pricing-licensing/index.html?intend...

[1] http://www.mathworks.com/pricing-licensing/index.html?intend...

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