I'm surprised to hear they're still teaching MATLAB to civil engineering students in college. I learned MATLAB in college the late 2000s, but it was proprietary and expensive so I never used it.

STEM students should definitely be learning Python instead of MATLAB. It can do anything MATLAB can do, and is free and accessible.

Good #Coding practices question for #Documentation:

Are there some general guidelines on what info to put in the comment at the top of each code file? Like date, author, basic description of what the code does? Maybe something about dependencies? Are there templates for this somewhere (e.g. for #Matlab or #Python if that matters)?

#cars #DataScience #programming #linux #matlab

I was interested in collecting data from my car, specifically to look at what happens during around gear changes.

I bought a cheap OBD-II interface and it turns out that you hardly need any code to capture RPM, Speed and throttle position- and plot some graphs with #Linux. Particularly if you have low standard for graphs.

There's a README and some plots.

https://github.com/sjaturner/obd

Too nerdy, right?

#matlab vs #gnuoctave : try computing
f=@(x,y) log(2+x)./atan(x-y)
c=@(x) -x
d=@(x) sin(x)
integral2(f,0,2,c,d)
then you'll get :
7.453231792656116 % with matlab
7.453230816525963 % with octave
a more accurate calculation gives
integral2(f,0,2,c,d,'AbsTol',1e-12)
7.453230816525963 % with matlab
7.453230816525963 % with octave
so matlab integral2 has not 1e-10 absolute error as said in the manual

Looks like the @unituebingen won't continue its #Matlab license due to the high cost and lack of state partners to share the financial load.

I very much appreciate this! This is money better spent elsewhere. Teach students #Python, #Rstats et al., not some weird proprietary software they can't use freely afterwards.

Now let the heated discussions in the institutes begin

Glad that we @umphy are using #FOSS.

Just for the record, one of the reasons graduate #students should use #R (or #Python, and generally a more foundational approach to programming) and not #Matlab is that it will give them useful skills outside of academia - we need to give tools for mobility.
#AcademicChatter

Seriously #anaconda this am I have messages from every other #nasa IT admin to get you off our system asap.

Your brilliant bu$ine$$ strategy has driven me back to macports.

My boss had me dump #matlab because of its price. Let me tell you how few #idl folks remain.

For computer science mastodoni— I’d welcome advice.

I use python principally as an olive branch to my students. Still rocking Fortran and compiled codes (like NCO) to do most of my analyses

Python and R are mostly for plots

Fun and games aside for a minute. If you use a #WarmingCurve since 1850 for #teaching, #scientific publication, or #ClimateChange advocacy, you need to check out Chan et al.'s new database - it's DCENT.
(seriously, a very nice #temperature compilation of the Industrial area... but why is the code in #Matlab?)

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-024-03742-x

#RStats #ROrigin storytime: during PhD doing #bioinformatics analysis in #Matlab, kept reading papers that used @Bioconductor packages.

I wrote so much stuff in Matlab, when I started my PostDoc in 2010 I was determined to learn R and make use of actual open source software and packages.

Rewrote some of my core PhD code in R to learn the core syntax, and attended a couple of workshops.

Having access to OSS made my work so much easier.

https://genomic.social/@lwpembleton/112986052081411325

OK I'm sold on #JuliaLang: it fills an interesting gap between #Python and C++. What's interesting about it is that it can be used for rapid prototyping not unlike Python, but (1) it basically comes with (faster) numpy built in and (2) it's possible to “gracefully” transition to more rigorous programming styles, which will usually bring potentially significant performance gains. And in contrast to #MATLAB, it's #FLOSS.