"Shubha Vishwanath Karanth" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Can I get a comparison between R and MATLAB? How is R efficient than MATLAB? Or what are the weaknesses of R compared to MATLAB?
Don't forget to compare licenses and cost. Matlab's rigid and unreasonable license is the main reason I use R now. Several years ago the Mathworks refused to let a post doc and me share a MatLab license -- they wanted all single-user licenses to be named users even if each of us only needed MatLab a few hours a month. I asked if they had a "math model" for what we got for a license, but they didn't care that there was a huge disconnect between what they wanted to sell and our usage needs. I quit using MatLab, converted my project from MatLab to R, and now steer as many people to R as possible. The Mathworks refuses to acknowledge that life-science users of math tools are not like physical science users. Biologists can spend weeks or months on experiments and then occasionally need high-end math tools for analysis. A single shared network MatLab license outside of academia is outrageously expensive. A single network concurrent license for Matlab and the Image processing, Signal Processing and PDE toolboxes costs $18,800 -- I received that quote just yesterday since we still have a few people that use existing MatLab code. MatLab may be a good product, but the Mathworks is unreasonable in how they license it. We are a non-profit, basic life scientific research institute and the Mathworks sells us the same license as for-profit businesses. Only degree-granting universities are eligible for academic pricing apparently. efg Earl F Glynn Bioinformatics Stowers Institute for Medical Research ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
