Matlab was not designed to teach a programming language. It does have an easy to use programming language that can be very useful in all engineering fields. One does not need to be a computer scientist to use the Matlab programming language. I used Matlab and Simulink on a daily basis for over 20 years modeling and designing control systems for military applications. We modeled both the electrical and mechanical characteristics of the system. The “controller” used many building blocks supplied by the Simulink library, but we also wrote a lot of the control “code” in Matlab.
Matlab is good for numerical analysis, and that’s it. You wouldn’t build the next Facebook in matlab lol. It’s good for what it is made to do, and it is approachable to many people in different fields who need to do numerical computations.
MATLAB's a practical modelling tool if you're proficient in it, otherwise the counter-intuitive semantics of the language, as you've mentioned, in addition to the overwhelming size and documentation of core MATLAB and its add-ons can make it disorientating to navigate and apply in practice to engineering problems and projects. It doesn't help that universities don't teach MATLAB anywhere near comprehensively enough to give students the fundamental understanding and confidence that they need to use it.
The problem is that scientists and engineering professors don't want to waste their time learning new languages. They are more concerned with the specific developments in their field. Therefore older lecturers will use and teach it. Not that it's a huge problem or anything, i quite like it. One advantage of it which wasn't mentioned here is that it's a program that you install in the normal way like you'd install a video game or an app. Rather than python which you install the compiler separately + anaconda and the environments are more complex, it let's students get going with the subject matter quite problem free. If you actually assign a task to engineering or science students inpython, your classroom is going to be a mad house because half the class won't be able to get going. I suppose Jupiter notepads are somewhat more like MATLAB in that regard.
Very true in terms of good accessibility for beginners being an influence - when we ran an introductory Python tutorial at the start of the academic year, we started people on Jupyter notebooks to ease some of those per-device installation problems. A lot of beginners can get turned off if they have to jump through a bunch of hoops
no mention of octave or scilab at all ?
Matlab was not designed to teach a programming language. It does have an easy to use programming language that can be very useful in all engineering fields. One does not need to be a computer scientist to use the Matlab programming language. I used Matlab and Simulink on a daily basis for over 20 years modeling and designing control systems for military applications. We modeled both the electrical and mechanical characteristics of the system. The “controller” used many building blocks supplied by the Simulink library, but we also wrote a lot of the control “code” in Matlab.
Matlab is good for numerical analysis, and that’s it. You wouldn’t build the next Facebook in matlab lol. It’s good for what it is made to do, and it is approachable to many people in different fields who need to do numerical computations.
MATLAB's a practical modelling tool if you're proficient in it, otherwise the counter-intuitive semantics of the language, as you've mentioned, in addition to the overwhelming size and documentation of core MATLAB and its add-ons can make it disorientating to navigate and apply in practice to engineering problems and projects. It doesn't help that universities don't teach MATLAB anywhere near comprehensively enough to give students the fundamental understanding and confidence that they need to use it.
The giggles says it all.
The problem is that scientists and engineering professors don't want to waste their time learning new languages. They are more concerned with the specific developments in their field. Therefore older lecturers will use and teach it.
Not that it's a huge problem or anything, i quite like it. One advantage of it which wasn't mentioned here is that it's a program that you install in the normal way like you'd install a video game or an app. Rather than python which you install the compiler separately + anaconda and the environments are more complex, it let's students get going with the subject matter quite problem free. If you actually assign a task to engineering or science students inpython, your classroom is going to be a mad house because half the class won't be able to get going. I suppose Jupiter notepads are somewhat more like MATLAB in that regard.
Very true in terms of good accessibility for beginners being an influence - when we ran an introductory Python tutorial at the start of the academic year, we started people on Jupyter notebooks to ease some of those per-device installation problems. A lot of beginners can get turned off if they have to jump through a bunch of hoops
Lab mat
SciLab
mat lab
mat lab
lab lab lab mat mat mat
SciLab