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Comment by buugs | Hacker News Reader

I am curious as to why you would hate matlab so much other than the clunkyness. EDIT: And of course cost/openness

Matlab works very well for many disciplines and the shear amount of documentation make it very easy to use for people who aren't really programmers. My main peeve with matlab is that to write a function it is required to make a separate file however most problems that are solved with matlab don't really need functions in the first place.

SciPy/NumPy and matplotlib can be nice to use but if I need to get an engineering problem done quickly I can find functions that I need much quicker in matlab and the matrix as the central object is very helpful.

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Yes, the closed system is a big thing. Anything interesting I may create will have to be re-written in another language if I want to extend/share with others. While it's not reasonable to use something like c to test out (computer vision in this case) algorithms in practical classes, Python is both simple and open.

The problem of having many possible combinations as mentioned by lliiffee doesn't seem like much of a big deal. Surely a faculty could just specify their recommended setup?

Sure, you can specify it. Specifying is no problem!

  > My main peeve with matlab is that to write a function it
  > is required to make a separate file however most problems
  > that are solved with matlab don't really need functions 
  > in the first place.

That's just where the madness begins! My current pet peeve is that you can't index the result of a function directly:

  x = 10:-1:1;
  
  a = sort(x)(1:5);   % illegal!  
  
  tmp = sort(x);      % depressing :(
  a = tmp(1:5);       

  f = @(x,i)x(i);     % a little better
  a = f(sort(x),1:5);

Every release gets a bit better, but there are still a lot of strange historical limitations.

You can define a second function in a file, with the constraint that it can only be used by the main function (I think). The following could happily go in one file named foo.m:

function rtn = foo(x)

rtn = bar(x) + 1

function rtn = bar(x)

rtn = x^2

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