MATLAB

Kommentare: I started with matlab from my undergrad days and still use it on daily basis for simulations and numerical analysis in my research work. Many industries (like the cellular network industry) heavily rely on Matlab for system level simulations. In my opinion, translating a pseudo code of any given algorithm to a working program is very easy in Matlab.

Vorteile: Matlab is an essential scientific computing environment. It is a must have for all students studying science and engineering. The pros are--
1. Easy manipulation of matrices. This is actually the main power of matlab.
2. Very intuitive way of writing program with no hassle of bookkeeping about data types, memory management, variable declarations etc which are essential for other programming languages.
3. Debugging tool is very easy to use.
4. One best feature is the GUI window for managing figures. A user can switch between the gui and the underlying code for generating any figures. This unique feature is absent in many of the advanced programming languages (like python or R, at least in the basic setup!)

Nachteile: The main problem is that it is not free. While the other open source languages have caught up Matlab in terms of ease of usage and availability of packages, Matlab is suffering due to its proprietary nature. A standard distribution of Matlab comes with a set of packages. For the other packages, one has to pay Mathworks for getting access. On the other hand, in Python or R, there are multiple packages available online and everything is free to use. After the recent boom in AI and machine learning, almost everyone has shifted to python to use the popular open source libraries released by several sources. Matlab being a proprietary software is failing to catch up to this fast evolving open source world!

Kommentare: MATLAB has been at the centerstage of our academic activities in general and research in particular. It has helped in solving research problems in the area of image processing. Medical diagnosis of various diseases, object recognition and character recognition are some specific areas in which MATLAB has been really useful. Now I am also researching in the area of data science. I have found it to be surprisingly and pleasantly useful in this area although people are making use of Python and its libraries and R for this purpose.

Vorteile: The abstraction of best of the cutting edge techniques scaled down to function level makes it powerhouse of research in the field of science and engineering. Input of data in the form of matrices make it intuitive to use and visualization of data makes it an extension of your own mind. It doesn't take much time before it gets you working with the lifeless data transforming it useful insights.

Nachteile: The black box approach of using functions wherein you are aware what the input and output of function is but not its source code is a double edge sword. Whereas it makes it easy to use the function per se but it also makes it difficult to customize software. The source code of the commonly used functions should be available.

Kommentare: I have used MATLAB for three years. In those years I have learned about MATLAB as well as I used it to solve so many mathematical problems. It is reliable, fast and also easy to use. The majority of engineering students as well as scientist are using MATLAB to achieve their purposes. But the person, who is going to use MATLAB to achieve his purposes, should have a proper knowledge about MATLAB. If someone uses MATLAB for solving very easy mathematical problems, I think it is unnecessary thing. According to my knowledge I think we should have proper understanding on that language to get more benefits.

Vorteile: As we all know, we use so many programing languages like c, java, MATLAB, HTML to communicate instructions to a machine. When we consider about benefits of MATLAB, it is very faster as well as comprehensive. Engineering students most probably use MATLAB for solving complex mathematical problems. But this language is also very familiar among scientist because it also eases their works. MATLAB provides helps to user for facilitating their tasks. It has so many syntax and keywords for different mathematical purposes. It gives us a chance to create functions as our needs. Therefore we can make functions to solve problems depending on our mathematical problems. MATLAB can be used as a calculator and it is very reliable. So the point of my view, as a person who is using MATLAB, I think it is very essential for engineering students.

Nachteile: Though MATLAB is very essential to engineering and other students when solving mathematical problems there are some difficulties with it. It has great number of keywords for arithmetic. So it is difficult to memories all those keywords when solving problems. And if we get an error in our code I think it is somewhat difficult to debug. And the other thing is the time it takes to give us the answer. MATLAB is an interpreted language, so that it is slower than a compiled language. It means MATLAB takes some time to give us the answer. We have to wait for the answer. It cannot be bought freely and also people should have knowledge about MATLAB before it use otherwise it is not easy to work with this language.

Vorteile: For mathematicians and data scientists, MATLAB is easy to pick up and intuitive to use.

Nachteile: As a developer, I have a few issues with MATLAB. Its best practices would generally regarded as bad practices in other languages, meaning that experience often doesn't translate. When developing modular and extensible applications, MATLAB's runtime performance seems to degrade when compared to other languages, despite uitilising Java for a number of backend processes. Frequently, when working with legacy MATLAB code, I often find myself thinking that a given task could be easier achieved and made more maintainable with Python and its innumerable free packages, in contrast to MATLAB's toolboxes, which tend to require more money.

Kommentare: I recommend MATLAB if you handle heavy mathematical problems in your career. Otherwise it is not needed for a person who handles complex mathematical problems rarely because of the high cost. This software is especially suitable for engineers, scientists and mathematicians. Since MATLAB is fast, powerful and accurate software, those people can ease their work using MATLAB. MATLAB can be highly recommended for the data analysis purposes because the software gives out very accurate output for the processed raw data. MATLAB is a great tool for the commercial use, but not for the personal use.

Vorteile: MATLAB is a programming language specially designed for mathematical works. From this software we can interact with complex mathematical problems such as matrix problems, functions, data analysis, plotting graphs, signal processing and much more complex engineering and scientific problems. Lots of mathematical functions are built-in with MATLAB. They can be use directly to solve our problems as our need. If the needed function is not available built-in, we can create one and save it for future use. Special keyword called “help” is designed in MATLAB to find the meaning of unknown keywords and how to use that keyword (i.e. If we want to find the meaning of keyword det, help det shows the meaning of keyword det and what can we done using this keyword. Also it shows how to use this keyword in MATLAB). There is a mobile application developed for MATLAB. We can solve some of the mathematical operations that are not much complex with the use of mobile application also. This option helped me a lot when the PC or laptop is not with me. Another advantage of MATLAB is the advanced user interface comes with software that eases the process of coding and debugging.

Nachteile: Since MATLAB is used to compute complex mathematical operations, there are many functions, keywords and syntaxes are used in MATLAB. Therefore it is difficult to remember all these functions, keywords and syntaxes in our mind. Much time is required for the installation process of the software even in a high end computer. Same issue happens when executing the program also. We have to wait some time until the MATLAB is loaded before working on it. Also it uses higher amount of RAM. Because of this we cannot run MATLAB smoothly in a low end computer. Since MATLAB is mathematic related software it cannot be used as general purpose programming language. MATLAB is commercial software and the cost for the software also very high. Therefore it is not worthy if we buy it without a proper knowledge on MATLAB and how to get the maximum output from the software.