MATLAB

Kommentare: Matlab is an extremely powerful system modelling tool and development environment. Students and professionals that work in the engineering and science backgrounds will find this software invaluable.

Vorteile: The software allows users to perform complex computations (linear algebra, differential equations, integration transforms etc), system modelling, and develop programmed algorithms that can be executed and simulated. I used this software from my undergraduate days, whilst studying electronic engineering, to compute state space models of control systems and visually analyse control loops from their transfer functions using Matlab's programming script feature and graphing capabilities. I also used it to quickly develop, simulate (using the Simulink toolbox add-on), graphically observe and fine tune the performance of a PID controller which was much easier and quicker than manually calculating and plotting the solutions. Numerous mathematical processes that usually require multiple steps can be executed by a single prebuilt command on Matlab, e.g the [x , y] = cart2pol(theta, r) command converts Cartesian co-ordinates into polar co-ordinates; this greatly simplifies the programming and mathematical input required by the user. Since its latest update (R2019a), Matlab is fully capable of developing, simulating and training deep neural networks, autonomous systems and a lot more.

Nachteile: Due to its extensive capabilities, this software can be complicated and over whelming for first time users. The complexity also inflates the memory requirements of the software. The syntax, notation and structure to input commands requires some time to get used to. Sometimes, when trying to achieve certain calculations, it leads to error messages that require some time to understand and correct. In fact, users need to understand the basic rules of linear algebra first (matrix multiplication, addition etc) in order to perform calculations because this program treats all numerical inputs as vectors/matrices. Users will also need to have some programming capabilities in order to fully utilize the computational capabilities of this software, which is similar in structure to C programming, using the propriety programming language that is developed by MathWorks.

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!