Robert Kern wrote: > 1. Write grant proposals. > > 2. Advise and teach students.
Sorry I forgot the part about writing grant applications. As for teaching students, I have thankfully not been bothered with that too much. > Yes, and this is why you will keep saying, "My simulation is running too > slowly," and "My simulation is running out of memory." All the vectorization > you > do won't make a quadratic algorithm run in O(n log(n)) time. Knowing the right > algorithm and the right data structures to use will save you programming time > and execution time. Time is money, remember, and every hour you spend tweaking > Matlab code to get an extra 5% of speed is just so much grant money down the > drain. Yes, and that is why I use C (that is ISO C99, not ANSI C98) instead of Matlab for everything except trivial tasks. The design of Matlab's language is fundamentally flawed. I once wrote a tutorial on how to implement things like lists and trees in Matlab (using functional programming, e.g. using functions to represent list nodes), but it's just a toy. And as Matlab's run-time does reference counting insted of proper garbage collection, any datastructure more complex than arrays are sure to leak memory (I believe Python also suffered from this as some point). Matlab is not useful for anything except plotting data quickly. And as for the expensive license, I am not sure its worth it. I have been considering a move to Scilab for some time, but it too carries the burden of working with a flawed language. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list