On Fri, Feb 18, 2011 at 8:36 AM, rjf <fate...@gmail.com> wrote: > Many people using Matlab are, I think, using it within some > organization > such as a college or an engineering lab. The incremental cost for one > more Matlab user license is small and probably part of the overhead of > the organization, and so there is no apparent cost to the individual > user. This has the very significant advantage (to me) that it is > free (as in free beer). The problem with Sage by comparison is that > it is free (as in free press) but has significant overhead for the > first person to try to install it somewhere, (apparently still, > especially on Windows...) But again that is another story.
At University of Washington, even with a site license, MATLAB costs me $100, so I don't have it on my laptop. There are limited licenses for students, and I've been told they have trouble doing homework assignments, due to sharing those licenses. In my experience, installing MATLAB is much more difficult than installing Sage. I can imagine no worse hell than being asked to install a working MATLAB on a bunch of random Linux, OS X, and Windows boxes. >> > I am not surprised that there is a relatively small overlap between >> > scientific >> > computing and Python programming. Most scientific computing tasks are >> > sensitive >> > to efficiency of resulting code. >> >> This is just FUD, suggesting that one can't use Python for scientific >> computing due to it being too slow. > > Well, the issue is not so much the programming language efficiency, > or how much it matters in practice to have some data setup and web > access > and debugging be written in a friendlier languaage, but a perception. Thus your FUD is all the more damaging.... >> Most people doing scientific also >> use C/Fortran-based libraries such as numpy and scipy, and quite a few >> use Cython as well. > > Can't those libraries (or something like them) also be called from C > or Fortran? If those libraries = "numpy/scipy", then absolutely not. Most of the code in numpy is new code, which provides a different and powerful perspective on n-dimensional data manipulation that isn't provided by any underlying library it depends on (BLAS). Some of scipy is just wrapping Fortran libraries, and some (quite a bit) is new code not wrapping anything. -- William -- William Stein Professor of Mathematics University of Washington http://wstein.org -- To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
