Hacker News Reader

Comment by Kronopath | Hacker News Reader

Or you could just use Octave, which is an open-source Matlab clone that has almost all its core features:

https://www.gnu.org/software/octave/

Octave is good if you have to write matlab compatible code (or just like matlab and don't have access to it).

The new kid on the block Julia[1] is actually pretty nice and as someone who has written a lot of matlab code is quite similar and easy to learn.

If you don't need or want syntax similar to matlab python+scipy+numpy+matplotlib is pretty great.

I was stuck with matlab for most of my work though because of simulink+control systems toolbox and preexisting codebase.

[1]: http://julialang.org/

> If you don't need or want syntax similar to matlab python+scipy+numpy+matplotlib is pretty great.

Yes, Python is a great alternative here. Especially for more complex computations, the advantages of a very well designed generic language play very well with the specialized math stuff.

As an aside, I hope that one day something like Octave/Gnuplot for Android will let us finally be rid of the anachronistic TI-84, which only still exists because of a dirty relationship with the educational establishment.

As a mathematics educator at a community college I fully agree with your sentiment. However, faculty tend to dislike the use of smartphones or tablets as calculators since one can have notes on the device and use the internet. I personally have banned all calculators, notes, and tablets during quizzes. I require my students to Mathematica for take home assignments. They do not pay extra for Mathematica as we have a site license.

The TI-84 should not exist at all. It is underpowered and way overpriced. I think it is still used since students pay for the devices and not faculty. Institutional lethargy is at play.

My wife teaches high-school math. Course material and textbooks contain step-by-step instructions for a TI-83+, and they have class sets of the darned things.

This zombie hardware is thoroughly entrenched.

At the very least if the lessons targeted MatLab, we could see OSS implementations like Octave. But all the TI emulators still rely on pirated TI firmware.

In addition to Octave, PARI/GP and Singular should be mentioned, especially for number theory and algebraic computations:

http://pari.math.u-bordeaux.fr/

http://www.singular.uni-kl.de/

Agreed. My thesis work is entirely within Octave. It gets the job done, and anyone anywhere can review my work.

Some of MATLAB's toolkits are very nice, but day-to-day work is easily covered by Octave.

Octave is GNU, and the GNU project prefers to speak of free software than open source:

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.h...

The philosophical distinction matters a lot to me. I don't work on Octave because I think this is a better development model. I work on it because I think we should all be free to read and share our code and our algorithms.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com