I have been using R for about 2 years and recently took a 6 week introductory course to Matlab. I can give entirely personal answers to your questions.
1. 'How smart?'. Don't know exactly what you mean, but both languages are extremely functional. Both emphasize writing of functions to call rather than repeatedly typing in the same code, so they encourage good programming practice. I started with R, so prefer its syntax. 2. 'Learning curve'. Similar. R has a simpler interface. Matlab has various enhancements that may help in the learning process, for example the path browser and workspace browser in which you can interactively keep track of all the objects in the workspace. Both have comprehensive help packages. 3. 'Further development'. Has to be R- its FREE! I don't know many students who would fork out the money for a Matlab license. 4. 'Flexibility'. Both are perhaps infinitely flexible. You can write any code you like, to do any statistical or mathematical processing. I would say R is better for statistical analysis (though Matlab has a stats package you can purchase), while Matlab is designed for mathematics. With Matlab you can compile GUIs to run analyses, which are probably useful for sharing with people who can't program. Some other points. 1. I have heard that Matlab is faster than S-PLUS (and hence R?) at performing calculations. 2. I found Matlab to be quite frustrating in its handling of data- for example it is extremely difficult to save a data frame in which variables are labelled with there names. Hope this helps. Dan Bebber Department of Plant Sciences University of Oxford South Parks Road Oxford OX1 3RB UK ------------------------------ Message: 24 Date: Sun, 25 Apr 2004 11:08:09 +0200 From: Tamas Papp <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [R] R vs Matlab: which is more "programmer friendly"? To: R-help mailing list <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Hi, The department of economics at our university (Budapest) is planning a course on numerical methods in economics. They are trying to decide which software to use for that, and I would like to advocate R. The other alternative is Matlab. I have found comparisons in terms of computational time for matrix algebra, but I don't think that is relevant: the bottleneck for economists is usually the programmer's time: if it takes a couple of hours to write something that is run only a few times, one should not care whether it runs in 2 or 2.1 minutes... I am an economist, and I have used Octave, but only until I found R. So I am not in a position to evaluate Matlab vs R. I would be grateful if somebody could compare R to Matlab, especially regarding the following: 1. How "smart" the language is. R appears to be a nice functional programming language, is Matlab comparable? Last time I used Octave, it seemed to be little more than syntactic sugar on some C/Fortran libraries. It appears to me that using R gradually pushes people towards better programming habits, but I may be biased (I am a Scheme lover). 2. Learning curve. If somebody could share his/her experience on using R or Matlab or both in the classrom, how students take to it. 3. Which language do you think is better for students' further development? We would like to equip them with something they can use later on in their career even if they don't become theoretical economists (very few undergraduate students do that). 4. How flexible are these languages when developing new applications/functions? Very few of the problems I encounter have a ready-made solution in a toolbox/library. Thanks, Tamas -- Tamás K. Papp E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Please try to send only (latin-2) plain text, not HTML or other garbage. ------------------------------ _______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html End of R-help Digest, Vol 14, Issue 25 ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html