"Dependent on" ???

"Dependent on" ???

Posted Feb 28, 2007 7:13 UTC (Wed) by tnoo (subscriber, #20427)
In reply to: "Dependent on" ??? by eklitzke
Parent article: Mitchell Baker and the Firefox Paradox (Inc)

You describe very well the situation as it was five years ago (the LaTeX
solution with inputenc is even older). I'll reply to the math part:

> Octave and Maxima. If you want a Maple-like math implementation, octave
> is your only choice in the free software world. And it is miles behind
> Matlab. While octave does what it does very well, it isn't even close
> to Matlab/Mathematica/Maple wrt feature parity.

There are more alternatives like scilab, but the one that really rocks is
the Python + scipy + matplotlib combo (http://www.scipy.org).

While not as polished as Matlab, it very often exceeds Matlab in
simplicity, elegance speed and feature set. Python is a real programming
language, and combined with the wonderful new numerics module (numpy,
part of scipy) you get terse, readable expressions like data[T>0] (give
me the data when T exceeds 0). Scipy contains Python wrappers for the
better part of netlib, among many others.

And of course it is free and open which is an incredible asset if you
need that functionality on yet an other field computer. In addition you
have the all the great Python libraries at hands, so serial port
communication, web interfaces, databases, GIS tools are just one "import"
statement and 10 lines of code away.

tnoo

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