Allen wrote: > Does anyone agree with me? > If you have used Matlab, welcome to discuss it.
Matlab is a tool for scientists and engineers. Python is a tool for programmers. I think you are looking at Python from the scientist perspective. Python's numpy and matplotlib modules would probably feel familiar to anyone with some matlab experience. But these are not a part of the language - it is not even a part of the standard library. I will not go deep into the programmer perspective. Some more programmer tools: Java, Tcl, Perl, PHP, Lisp, Ruby. Comparing Python to these makes sense. I think comparing Matlab to any of those would be absurd. Have a look at modpython.org - is there a need for a similar modmatlab? Now, back to the scientist perspective. In 1999, I was starting my M.Sc. in astrophysics and had to select my data analysis tools. I needed the standard scientific tools: scripting, numerics, graphics - Matlab + shell is good enough for this. But I also needed a library for FITS file processing, which was not available in Matlab. So Matlab alone was not enough. Matlab + IRAF + shell was one alternative. Shell + IDL (Interactive Data Language) was another. There were also other possibilities (Fortran for numerics, C or Ftools for FITS). To cut it short, after a while I ended up with shell + IDL as my main tools, occasionally using the others. About two years later my scripts were so complex I decided to learn a scripting language. I was lucky enough to choose Python. Soon I found pyraf, pyfits and numarray, later gnuPlot.py and matplotlib - IDL was no longer needed. Python was enough. Then one day I was looking for a postdoc position. I found something else, and now I do text mining. I still need the science tools: scripting, numerics, graphics. I also need: 1) Regular expressions 2) XML library 3) Database interface Python covers it all. I think Matlab has a Database interface, but how about the others? -- Juho Schultz -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
