Trying not to hijack this thread ... Why do people use particular software (e.g. Matlab vs. Octave vs. ..Sage..) a. Their teacher tells them to use it b. They do not pay for it anyway (school license, company license) c. They know it works and they don't have to mess with installing it. d. Their friends and colleagues use it. (applications ready-made) e. The company that sells it is responsive to customer questions. f. The company sells a ready-made optimized installations for your computer and OS. g. The company (or other companies) sell ready-made application packages that you can buy for specific common engineering tasks (e.g. signal processing, circuit design, financial options analysis) etc.
I suspect that most engineers are happy to pay someone else some amount of money so they do not have to do work which is essentially irrelevant to their occupational training in, say, civil engineeering, structural engineering, etc. Just as I am happy to pay a plumber (well, not THAT happy) to do something that I could, in principle, do myself if I spent enough time at it, and had the right tools. Thus the tradeoff of <free + n hours playing install-slave+read-docs-slave+ write program> vs <pay $200 / type parameters into someone's canned program's graphical interface> is fairly clear, at least if your salary is more than $200/n per hour. I think that many Matlab users who are compelled to buy licenses and have concerns over the cost are aware of the free-clone possibilities like Octave. I think that using Sage because it overlaps with and/or is a superset of Matlab is not so appealing to someone who is already a Matlab user familiar with Matlab syntax and not much else. I've used Matlab myself, and I've written a parser for (an early) version of Matlab's syntax, and interfaced other programs with matlab. I do not consider myself a typical Matlab user, however. I have an opportunity to observe them (at least the ones in an academic setting). n Aug 15, 12:58 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. > > My answer: "It's very difficult for *me* to answer this question > myself, because MATLAB is useless for most of my own > teaching/research/work, but I realize it is very widely used in > applied mathematics. Based on going to Scipy and the resources I've > seen online, it appears that the Numpy/Scipy stack is extremely useful > to actual people doing numerical computation. Maybe I'll try > asking on sage-devel." > > [NOTE: I am interested in people's answers, rather than somebody > hijacking this thread to try to define "viable alternative" or say > this isn't a scientific survey or something. Please try not to hijack > this thread. Thanks!] > > -- William > > -- > William Stein > Professor of Mathematics > University of Washingtonhttp://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
