Re: Inquiry Into Octave

[Michael Pender]

Brandon, 

Like many other choices, it largely depends on your budget and your preferences.  I learned on Matlab, but at the time I was a student and had access to Matlab for free.  Then I went to work for a series of large, well-funded organizations that had the money to pay the annual licensing fees to purchase Matlab.  When I started my own company I evaluated Matlab and the parallel computing libraries, and found that it didn't really meet my needs.  It just didn't work well enough to justify spending $1000 or more of my own money on licensing fees when Octave is such a comparable product.  I do think Matlab is a bit more developed in some ways, but not enough to justify the cost difference to me.  Your decision may be different depending on your circumstances and the licensing arrangement available to you.  

- Mike

On Fri, Jan 31, 2014 at 12:23 AM, Brandon Morrison <address@hidden> wrote:

To Whom It May Concern,

     MATLAB is obviously well used in industry.  I would rather use
free, open-source versions; however, a good amount of the arguments do
not seem compatible with MATLAB.  Also, lots of the IDE programs for
Octave either seem to be stalled or dead.  Having said this, is there an
active effort to better reproduce the syntax of MATLAB in Octave and
perhaps bundle it in an IDE?  I ask this because it almost seems like a
waste of time to learn Octave if the vast majority of researchers and
institutions use MATLAB.  I should then learn MATLAB and ignore Octave,
or so this appears.  Furthermore, reproduction of the syntax would
better enable people to convert to Octave in the future, i.e. no
learning curve.  I appreciate your time.

-Brandon Morrison
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