> Date: Wed, 11 May 2005 07:49:38 +0200 > From: Jerzy Karczmarczuk <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > Michael Vanier wrote: > > >I have enough problems convincing people to learn Scheme. I've > >even had people beg me to teach them Matlab as a first programming > >language, because that is the only language that they needed to get their > >work done. Telling them that Matlab's programming language is a creeping > >horror doesn't sway them at all. > > > > > Now, why so? > I won't defend the Matlab language too strongly, but I used it > for teaching scientific computations, I exploited the vectorized > expressions, I used objects, and even a lot of functional > constructs. I don't see any reason to call it a creeping horror. > It is quite homogeneous and simple, and is decently interfaced. > > Jerzy Karczmarczuk >
It's incredibly inconsistent. To cite just one example, the syntax is geared towards the notion that "everything is a two-dimensional matrices of double-precision floating point numbers". If you want to have a three-dimensional array, you can do that, but the syntax is not going to be nearly as elegant, because matlab's array syntax doesn't scale at all. I haven't used matlab seriously for a few years (thankfully), but I vaguely recall several other instances of the same problem. Basically, matlab makes programming very easy within a very restricted domain, but if you want to go outside that domain, you will have to endure a lot of pain. That is not good language design. In contrast, Mathematica has a pretty consistent and elegant language. Mike _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
