I'm cross-posting this to the Octave maintainers' mailing list in case other maintainers also want to comment on it or correct anything I say here.
On 15 August 2011 14:58, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote: > If somebody walked up to *you* and asked: "Is Sage now a viable > alternative to MATLAB?" what would you say? I'm especially > interested in what people who do numerical/applied computation > think. With Octave we deal with people like this all the time. They basically want Matlab, not a substitute, because their instructor/employer/whoever has told them it must be Matlab and it can't be anything else. They often also have code written in Matlab that can't be translated. In the case of running the exact same code, which happens very frequently with Matlab, I can tell you that for these people rewriting their code in Scipy isn't an alternative (I am obviously also referrring to Numpy, as the core component of Scipy). One of the most frequent requests we get in Octave and then everyone will magically jump ship from Matlab is to implement a GUI (or an editor, or a profiler, or an integrated debugger, or all of Simulink). They want it to look almost exactly like Matlab too, or else they won't use it. For a long time we've ignored this request, but it comes up so often that it's hard to keep ignoring it, and a Matlabish-looking GUI is a release goal for our next version, and the work is well underway. There are also a lot of people for whom Matlab is only incidental and what they really want is Simulink. For this, neither scipy nor Octave have any sort of alternative, but I understand Scilab has something called Xcos that does sort of work like Simulink. Matlab users also tend to have highly specific requests. They want the *exact* same function from some particular Matlab toolbox and they want it to work the same way in Octave (or presumably, a direct equivalent in Scipy), even for silly things like rref because, again, their instructor/employer/whoever told them that that is the function they must use. I have recently started working with Scipy, and my impression is that it has smaller set of contributed functions than Octave and smaller than Matlab, so when someone from Matlab wants this or that low-pass filter and accepts no substitute, they get easily frustrated with the free alternatives and go back to Matlab. A big gap in Scipy due to silly licencing issues is FFTW, which is the de-facto standard FFT library both Octave and Matlab use; FFTPACK is an ok substitute and all that Scipy has. Signal processing is one of Matlab's biggest use cases and a poor FFT implementation is problematic. I imagine demanding users like this exist for the other three big M's too, but Matlab to me seems to have a well-entrenched niche separate from the other three M's whoh at least somewhat compete with each other, whereas Matlab has no direct big competitor. The competition in the other three M's has at least opened up the users of those CASes to the possibility of learning a new syntax, but my impression is Matlab users are less flexible in this regard. HTH, - Jordi G. H. GNU Octave developer -- 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