Re: Octave's and Matlab's limitations

[Francesco Potortì]

>But, for the purpose of full disclosure, here are the things that
>peeve me off the most about this language:
[...]
>These are just off the top of my head, but ten is a good, round
>number, so I'll stop there. I could go on. Matlab is a horrible,
>*horrible* general-purpose programming language

Well, the fact is, Matlab is not a general-purpose language :)

>and I'm appalled that people use it to build web servers and GUI
>applications and who knows what other atrocities they build with it.

Why ever worrying about that?  I suppose you already know that someone
has written a Tetris game in Sed.

>And to be fair, fine, Matlab and Octave are ok for array-based
>numerical computations, but people rarely used them for only that.

Well, that's their problem...

>I am kinda frustrated how one of Matlab's and Octave's primary use
>cases is to draw graphs from data without actually doing any
>significant computations on that data. 

I often use the epsTk toolkit at www.epstk.de, which is good for
producing high-quality plots.  But for quick or simple plots Octave is
good enough.

>And even if you *do* want to do numerical analysis, we're having new
>contenders like the Julia language which are already being better
>designed from the ground up, much better than Matlab ever was, by
>people who actually design programming languages professionally.

That was said for every language after Fortran, yet very few (or none)
have really died.

-- 
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