What tf is matlab
I got a job for the summer, and I had to learn it by myself
Is it really a pain in the ass or is it just complicated to learn ?

It's kinda different because you have to think mostly in matrix operations. Loops and other conditionals should be avoided.

@kenogo I don't enjoy Matlab either, but to be fair, if you're putting dots in front of every operator you're kinda doing it wrong... the dot is only needed when you need to make a distinction between scalar and vectorial operations between vectors/matrixes.

Sure, it may be a bit confusing at first, but imo that's the least of its problems (looking at you, "index starts at 1")

@Double-A but what about iterative algorithms? There's plenty of stuff that can only be done through loops and conditionals

@runfrodorun no

@kenogo you can have matrix exponentials too (such as A^B, where both A and B are a matrix - dunno about any practical applications, but it exists).

You're right, in my experience element-wise operations tend to be more common than vectorial expressions too, but you can at least skip the dot when doing scalar*vector (or scalar*matrix), so I've never been too bothered by it.
If anything, it helps me stop and think about the operation that I'm doing, so it's a good double-check for me.

@runfrodorun NO

@runfrodorun I torrented the version with lifetime license, does it count as free ?

Matlab has it's uses. And actually matrix and vectors are two very important pieces in mathematics. If you want to simulate some sort of process, you can do it with matrices. And yes the language itself is strange, and you can do really freaky things with it. But it is not a general purpose language, it is a language that is tailored for scientific research. So it isn't supposed to be fast, it is supposed to be easy with a mathematical background. Btw, it is used on any technical field at university level.

And I also don't like it, but it certainly has it uses.

Essentially worthless.

I've never seen a successful use of it in the industry. I've seen it used it schools, I've heard it's used in research (schools?)... but bring it to work and expect to be treated like you've just brought in your blankey and pacifier.

Having said that, good luck, if you're learning it could potentially help with what you're learning so I guess it has its place.

Index starts with 1. Nuff said.

XS, YS, Ts, A, B, and, in exceptional cases, dT. These are the allowed variable names in matlab. This is not enforced by the language, but usage of other names in variables are heavily frowned upon and will make even the most experienced MATLAB professional confused and scared.

My 0.02$ as a uni student who's using it for some of his courses, but is also learning Python and C++ on his own:

It's good as a quick prototyping language for light uni work, and it's a great stepping stone for numerical analysis courses, as it allows non-programmers to focus on the math without caring too much about the code.

Of course, there are other free tools such as Octave that allow you to do the same, but that's a different story.

As far as programming goes though, I agree that it's horrible and it should die in a fire, and going through someone else's scripts often requires a great deal of masochism, especially if they're not programmers (so 90% of other people).