Comment by chunky1994 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chunky1994 | Hacker News Reader

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This.

I couldn't agree more. WHile I've had only a brief stint with MATLAB at an internship, the code was possibly the ugliest thing I'd ever seen. Given that I'm a physics major and will probably be encountering matlab quite frequently, I sure hope that it won't be so horribly documented, and just so unreadable.

I was so offended, I had to rewrite over 2000 lines of code in python, and on completion, the python code was a little of 700 lines, clean, and so god-damn readable.

To any other academics out there, I urge, no plead with you to consider using a more general purpose programming language. It is a nightmare for undergrads like me to try and extend matlab to further applications.

However, I'm glad to say that the first computational physics course we will be taking at our university teaches us python, thankfully someone in the department had a clear view of what was going to benefit us.

> Given that I'm a physics major and will probably be encountering matlab quite frequently, I sure hope that it won't be so horribly documented, and just so unreadable.

Coming from another physics major... don't get your hopes up. Just do your thing and hope that others follow suit.

> I was so offended, I had to rewrite over 2000 lines of code in python, and on completion, the python code was a little of 700 lines, clean, and so god-damn readable.

It's amazing how easy it is to rack up 2000 lines of matlab repmat mashing. On the bright side, at least your lab didn't insist that you stick with their nightmare of .m files.

> the first computational physics course we will be taking at our university teaches us python

Indeed, that should be fairly pleasant. Particularly because you can easily implement a lot of the iterative algorithms without needing to translate all of the mathematical 1-indexed stuff into c-like 0-indexed memory. Can't tell you how many bugs I had because of that.

My first comp phys course was taught using only barebones C. We had to implement all the numerical routines from scratch, with nothing but stuff like stdlib.h, math.h, etc. In later courses they allowed us to use whatever we wanted really, but often the techniques would be very complex and the prof would provide some matlab code for us (e.g. an n-dimensional meshing routine) that was too much of a hassle to re-implement, so I ended up doing a lot of it in matlab anyhow :-/

Oh I see!

If you've been through the same thing, I would definitely want to be able to contact you in case you have any advice on such matters.

Could I request you to provide me some way of remaining in touch with you?

Thank you!

kyzyl [standard delimiter] kyzyl [standard delimiter] ca

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