On Mon, Aug 15, 2011 at 3:58 PM, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi, > > 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.
I'm an engineer and I use MATLAB pretty extensively so I think I can provide that viewpoint. Sage isn't really a viable alternative to MATLAB and really isn't likely to be any time soon. The SciPy/NumPy parts cover the basics of MATLAB, but most people use a number of toolboxes that go beyond the basics. In my case, I use the System Identification toolbox, the Spline toolbox, and some of the optimization routines. In addition, I have a lot of existing code that I rely upon that I'd have to convert. The Spline toolbox I could reproduce a lot with the B-Spline routines from the SLATEC library. The Fortran routines there are from de Boor's Splines textbook (which is also the basis for the Spline toolbox). The System ID toolbox is partially implemented in Octave (and possibly in SciPy), but I've found no open source implementation of the routine I find essential, ETFE (Empirical Transfer Function Estimate) which given a set of input data and a set of output data will estimate the transfer function. Oh, I also rely upon Code Generation routines in Maple that output MATLAB code. I could have them output Fortran or C, but then I'd have to look at how to interface with them as well (but that's likely not as seamless). This is even aside from things like embedded code generation or Simulink. I think you'd find that most people will run into cases where at least one routine they need isn't supported. Now, that's been happening with Octave and as such, they've been getting better toolbox support, but I know I'd have to improve at least their System ID support before I could think about switching. Cheers, Tim. -- Tim Lahey PhD Candidate, Systems Design Engineering University of Waterloo http://about.me/tjlahey -- 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
