Ken Iverson knew about MATLAB and had spoken with Cleve Moler when Jsoftware and MathWorks both had booths in conferences in the 1990s.
On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 1:46 AM, Skip Cave <[email protected]> wrote: > Well, now I've gotten a week or so into Stanford's Machine Learning course. > The second week of the course is all about learning the Octave > programming language. > In my previous post I described why the professor, Andrew Ng, says he chose > the Octave language to teach the course. > > It turns out that Octave is essentially an open-source derivation of > Matlab, which is nice for students since Octave is free, and commercial > versions of Matlab run several hundred dollars, and even the student > version of Matlab is $100. > > As I work through the Octave examples, I am struck by the similarities to J > and APL. This means that the Matlab language must also be similar to J/APL, > though I have never used it. Generally, the syntax of Octave is a bit more > convoluted than J and the underlying concepts of Octave/Matlab aren't quite > as elegant as J, but much of the functionality of Octave is similar to the > basic ideas in J/APL. This is particularly true with the idea of extending > scalar functions to vectors and matrices. > > I will be working through the assignments over the next few days, so I will > get more insight into the similarities. I'll give another report in a few > days. > > Skip > > -- > Skip Cave > Cave Consulting LLC > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
