About alternatives to Matlab

[Niels L Ellegaard]

Jon Harrop wrote:
> So I'm keen to learn what Python programmers would want/expect from F# and
> OCaml.

I think this discussion becoming is a little misguided.

The real strength of scipy is the elegant notation rather than speed.
Being raised with Matlab I find scipy nicely familiar, and its fast
enough for many tasks. Some would argue that the strength of scipy is
the weakness of ocaml. Others would disagree. That is a question of
taste.

My only grudge about strongly recommending scipy to friends is the way
that two arrays can share the same data. This can lead to subtle errors
that I will eventually be blamed for. I don't know if arrays in Matlab
(or Octave) can share data, but if they do, then everything happens
behind the scenes and the user does not have to worry. I would love to
see a future version of numpy that was 50% slower and had a more
foolproof approach to array copying.

http://www.scipy.org/Tentative_NumPy_Tutorial#head-1529ae93dd5d431ffe3a1001a4ab1a394e70a5f2


                                                                  Niels