ProgrammerHumor
matlabBadPost
Discussion
Matlab, or: Where you need a license to move the mouse pointer.
Their biggest crime is not making it clear in online documentation if a function is part of a toolbox or not.
So many times I have wasted time on this. It's insane that there isn't even an error message saying that the function you are trying to call is in a toolbox you don't have. For me it has always been some weird message implying that I am using the function incorrectly, rather than trying to use one I'm not permitted to use.
Hmm, I do at least usually get an error message that mentions a toolbox. Still super fucking annoying though since I'll have spent time reading documentation by the time I call the function.
Do people still use Matlab? And simulink?
University classes 😩
My university was using pirated version 😂
That’s pretty based haha
way back in the day we either had a university license if we needed big-boy matlab, or the coursework was such that it could be done in octave
Same. Professor even provided a gdrive link to download the specific version he was teaching with.
We get pendrive to copy ;)
Same, mine was using everything pirated, Matlab, Solidworks, Autocad, and many more lol
Is this satire?
Haha, yes it is, wrote it making fun of the opioid settlement a few years ago
I think last time i've seen it has indeed been in the college environment, but i did work with it in the real world at some point, intermittently.
jokes aside I think it's well suited for DSP/waveform analysis but I dont work in that field so idk rly
Last time i touched anything DSP was in college, i think. Or maybe not... What i do remember, everything neural networks related has been done on Matlab 20+ or so years ago, now - I don't think so.
Despite doing a lot of DSP I refuse to use it anyway because the licensing is so shit.
Still? That was a thing back in my day, didn't think they would still do it these days.
They do though.
Everyone in the automotive industry
It really depends on the field. I work in RF/comms engineering and it's absolutely inescapable, but most of the engineers I know outside of my field never have to touch it
Aerospace does
Yeah I work with implementing DSP algos on FPGAs and they have great tools for that
use octave
Yep unfortunatly, we do embedded development using simulink codegen at my work
Very big in aerospace
It's the dominating language in automation, like robotics and wind turbines. There's really no competitor when it comes to control implementation. Also the license cost is negligible compared to how much you save on implementation cost (engineering hours).
Do you think when you left school people just stopped doing university math? Some of those old goats bring up Fortran daily and you expect them to change their lesson plans for what reason exactly?
Yes and it's actually really awesome for a lot of engineering stuff. Although I'm hoping that Julia will eventually grow to challenge it
I get podcast ads about Matlab. It’s nostalgic.
Know of one place, mainly due to the vast existing code base in matlab
Older engineers
It was an incredibly powerful tool back at the times. But it did cost a fortune, and to me it feels everyone has abandoned it and most of what it could do has been slowly ported over to Python libs, and is 100% free to use. I:d fully expect Matlab to kick the bucket, TBH.
Side note - you can pretty much call me an "old engineer", i've been using it before, but that was well over 20 years ago.
Still no good simulink replacement afaik. Base MATLAB isn't worth it but if you need one of the packages you don't have much of a choice.
I remember rewriting some Fourier or wavelet stuff in C#, because python took several minutes to process data.
Too bad that there's no good science infrastructure in C#, I had to do many things manually, and Python has a really great ecosystem of ready to use libraries.
Python I’ve noticed is getting a lot quicker than what it was +10 years ago when I first learned it. I started using it again in the last 3 years heavily and it’s very capable especially in this respect. But that’s just my opinion and I don’t care for Python all that much.
Python definitely gets better. But it will never be faster than c++.
Python actually uses C++, but only for available libraries and functions. If you make custom algorithms it is slow. C# for loop is tons faster, and C++ for loop is even more fast. But I use C# because it has nice/safer threading and is cross platform.
My lab mates use Octave now
Octave is good for research - not good for development
Okay, I am genuinely curious what is the use case of matlab in actual software development?
I mean what can matlab do in development that a normal opensource high level language can't.
I mean it's easy to use. I can't think of an idea why will anyone choose matlab instead of anything else....
Why not SciLab though? The language is the same but at least it has a Simulink replacement.
All the downsides of MATLAB without any of the benefits
I had a professor and he wanted to know why didn't research papers use MATLAB for machine learning since it was so easy to do. I had to explain and demonstrate how far behind MATLAB was compared to PyTorch. At this point, MATLAB is like a toy compared to Python for science and engineering.
Depends on the kind of engineering, I work on DSP and it is still very heavily used. I try to use Python/numpy/scipy when possible, but there are not always great replacements available.
Octave
Can you test your code with a noisy sine wave input and check output in 30 s? Can you setup a template harness for serial testing of alarm handler files in a few minutes?
Ofc.
I had to use Matlab for one of my university assignments, it was to do with image processing / recognition. I hated everything about it. To Matlab: Kindly and unequivocally, fuck off.
Completely agree. The only thing Matlab was good for - it cured my aversion of Python. Absolutely everything is better than Matlab. How can something be THIS bad and fucking expensive and still get used?
Don't know for scientific usage, but Simulink and the ability to autocode embedded software is hard to beat in the industry.
Although I would wish it would be.
We had to use it "for historical reasons" aka they bought the licence and didn't have the time to change it to something else yet. At least it was only for one course.
But you were so close to a bunch of free shit!
Any programming language that starts with index 1 should be excised from this planet
Haven’t heard Julia in years. Do people actually use it?
I know one engineer personally, otherwise nah
Well you can just write a custom container in pretty much any language, just like what that example does, so this isn't really Julia specific, is it?
That seems even worse.
It is, it's actively bad you now have zero confidence in any array that some jackass didn't give it a wild ass index
MatLab is not a bad language/environment, it's just highly application specific. Outside of some extremely niche engineering applications, python is generally the better and easier choice (and it's always cheaper). Between matplotlib and numpy, most of MatLab's more broadly useful features are available in Python.
Also, MatLab is taught in a lot of EE degrees so there are lots of very poorly written MatLab scripts floating around. I say this as a former EE who has transitioned to software and now ports very messy EE MatLab scripts to python for my company 🤣
Have you tried developing in ABAP? You need to purchase a separate license for the Runtime, the Language Server and the IDE
Use gnu octave. Open source and near one-to-one compatibility with matlab.
Matlab <<< Julia
I loved using it
Bask in the warm glow of Octave superiority.Â
If it's good enough for my numerical methods instructor and her bajillion dollar research, it's good enough for me.Â
Something even worse happened to the Matlab license? Am I missing something?
It only really works well with itself --Someone who translates a lot of Matlab code to C++
Matlab is actually super easy to use in python
Great, that will be super handy if I need to do any data analysis in Python. Oh, wait.
what am I missing
Data analysis is usually done in python
Exactly. Python already has a massive suite of data tools, so there's not much need for Matlab integration most of the time.
Ahh I see, I see
Yeah, that's kind of the point
Probably because some madlad made a C++ wrapper to make python easier to use
I tried that but did not succeed, do you have some pointers/resources for me?
Do not do it. Just use Python.
Totally agree, but I am currently migrating a workflow from Matlab to Python and wanted to make the transition easier for some colleagues (so they can use their old Matlab scripts and can rewrite them one by one)
Yea man, you are telling me, our company probably spent a few hundred thousand dollars rewriting our MATLAB scripts into proper Python software. It's working well, now, a decade later. And we still have some legacy servers sitting there for if we need to run MATLAB again.
Embedded coder too expensive as well? ðŸ˜
Why don't you generate c++ code?