About alternatives to Matlab

[sturlamolden]

Rob Purser wrote:

> Anyway, I just wanted to call your attention to Data Acquisition Toolbox:
> http://www.mathworks.com/products/daq/

Absolutely. If the hardware is supported by this toolbox, there is no
need to reinvent the wheel. The license is expensive, but development
time can be far more expensive. Matlab is an excellent tool for
numerical work.

However, Matlab is only single-threaded and does not optimize its
pass-by-value semantics with proper 'escape analysis'. (Yes, Matlab
does lazy copy-on-write to optimize function calls, but functions have
return values as well.)  I have (temporarily?) stopped using Matlab
because I constantly got annoyed by the limitations of the language. I
still use Matlab as an advanced desktop calculator though. Somehow I
find it easier to type in an expression in Matlab than NumPy, probably
because I am more accustomed to the syntax.