wrongusername said:Perhaps it's just my own stupidity, but I've just tried Mathematica out and I still haven't found a way to augment 2 matrices A and B together, which in Matlab would have been simply been [A B].
This is not true. judging from that statement, I have a feeling that you have not even seen Mathcad, not used it. In our University, it's the program used by Engineers ( including 99.9% of chemical engineers), chemists, chemical physics to do serious chemical (kinetics etc) simulations etc. It's a very powerful program.PerennialII said:. Mathcad IMO is an extended scientific calculator ... the other 3 are meant for real scientific stuff and in such respect superior, but in simpler cases can be overly complex. .
Mathcad does all that plus other stuff faster than mathematica , MATLAB etc.PerennialII said:. I prefer Matlab in numerical number crunching tasks over Mathematica, but everything else I do pretty much with Mathematica.
mccoy1 said:This is not true. judging from that statement, I have a feeling that you have not even seen Mathcad, not used it. In our University, it's the program used by Engineers ( including 99.9% of chemical engineers), chemists, chemical physics to do serious chemical (kinetics etc) simulations etc. It's a very powerful program.
Mathcad does all that plus other stuff faster than mathematica , MATLAB etc.
daceymathers said:I use MATLAB and there are its advantages and disadvantages:
Advantages:
It let's you work in Matrices easily. It let's you do some complicated calculations quickly, without having to write a whole program or spreadsheet. Tons of add-ons and workbenches available to do a variety of tasks.
Disadvantages:
Just about everything else: horrible syntax, horrible development environment, dynamic types, not OO, a software development nightmare. It wasn't developed from a software development perspective, and it shows. Every lesson learned from the 30+ years of software development has been lost on this application, which forces users to do things that make any sensible software developer cringe
daceymathers said:I use MATLAB and there are its advantages and disadvantages:
Advantages:
It let's you work in Matrices easily. It let's you do some complicated calculations quickly, without having to write a whole program or spreadsheet. Tons of add-ons and workbenches available to do a variety of tasks.
Disadvantages:
Just about everything else: horrible syntax, horrible development environment, dynamic types, not OO, a software development nightmare. It wasn't developed from a software development perspective, and it shows. Every lesson learned from the 30+ years of software development has been lost on this application, which forces users to do things that make any sensible software developer cringe
DrDu said:How are the symbolic capabilities of MATLAB today, e.g. like finding an asymptotic expansion of the Macdonalds function with complex index?
muraii said:Hi, folks,
I'm looking to put together a toolset outside of Excel that will be used for risk analysis, forecasting, and eventually developing machine-learning algorithms for a financial services company. Excel is undeniably entrenched in ours, as in most, businesses, and that's fine. It's useful, and I think the best Microsoft product. But I'd really like to be able to work at a deeper level, both logistically and analytically, as we try to do more with our data, and as I learn how.
I'm a fan of Python though still basically a neophyte. I've similarly been a fan of the Sage project (http://www.sagemath.org/) for a while and puttered around with it. I'm not sufficiently committed to nor proficient in either, nor any other particular platform that might be used for data analysis.
Which is to say I'm in a position to need some more power tools and while I'm slightly predisposed to trying Python (using, perhaps, the pandas and scikit-learning libraries as well as Sage, which is developed in Python also) I'm not beholden to any particular system. I've just looked at Mathematica for the first time in a while, and considering how broad its reach is now (e.g., all of periodictable.com--built by Wolfram Research co-founder Theodore Gray--is generated with Mathematica) I'm intrigued. Matlab seems perhaps more focused on the functionality generally collected under the umbrella "data analysis". Either is, I'm sure, more than capable for beginner-to-intermediate sophistication. There are, of course, a variety of other options to consider as well.
Buying into Matlab and Mathematica, though, is buying into some amount of proprietary technology. Conversely, starting with Python or R or other open-source tools probably means building more infrastructure by hand. Each sounds interesting, and there's some potential for overlap as they can talk to one another. But we'll be (I hope) building a department around this functionality and I'd like to start us out on solid footing.
I would defer to what our tech platform uses, but we're a small business that lives on Microsoft Office, Google Apps, and a bespoke PHP application, so there's not much constraint there.
Thoughts?
Pythagorean said:I don't know about the others, but MATLAB works great with Excel. I would say if you want all the packages and technical support are willing to pay for it, go with matlab. But if you have the time to write your own scripts, hunt down non-standard packages, and learn to use them without tech support, then python is the cheaper option.
wrongusername said:Eh, I prefer Mathematica now after using it so much at UCLA. It's got a sort of Python/C++ feel to it. Here, it's the program that the physics department uses.
But I'm intrigued. Would it be easy to simulate, say, a number of particles bumping around in a box?
cryora said:For instance, but correct me if I'm wrong, Mathematica doesn't have conditional "blocks" of code which execute together, something you'd commonly see in C++/Python.
if (condition) {
//Do some stuff that needs multiple functions
}else{
//Do other stuff with multiple functions
}If[ condition,
(* Condition evaluates as true *)
temp = Table[ i, {i,1,100}];
tempSquared = Table[i^2, {i,1,100}];
tempSum=Sum[temp,{i,1,100}];
tempSumSquared = Sum[ tempSquared, {i,1,100}];
difference = tempSumSquared-tempSum; ,
(* Else block *)
temp = Table[ i, {i,1,100}];
tempCubed = Table[i^3, {i,1,100}];
tempSum=Sum[temp,{i,1,100}];
tempSumCubed = Sum[ tempCubed, {i,1,100}];
difference = tempSumCubed-tempSum;
]JorisL said:Do you mean like so?
C:if (condition) { //Do some stuff that needs multiple functions }else{ //Do other stuff with multiple functions }
You can do that with Mathematica using semi-colons
Code:If[ condition, (* Condition evaluates as true *) temp = Table[ i, {i,1,100}]; tempSquared = Table[i^2, {i,1,100}]; tempSum=Sum[temp,{i,1,100}]; tempSumSquared = Sum[ tempSquared, {i,1,100}]; difference = tempSumSquared-tempSum; , (* Else block *) temp = Table[ i, {i,1,100}]; tempCubed = Table[i^3, {i,1,100}]; tempSum=Sum[temp,{i,1,100}]; tempSumCubed = Sum[ tempCubed, {i,1,100}]; difference = tempSumCubed-tempSum; ]
It is harder to read in a notebook though.
Since Mathematica executes different code depending on whether the condition is true or false,cryora said:Yes, thanks for the correction. I didn't know you could do that. Does Mathematica have a simple way to implement more than two cases (in other words an equivalent to C++ "else if")?
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