Date: Wed, 11 May 2005 07:49:38 +0200 From: Jerzy Karczmarczuk
Michael Vanier wrote:
I have enough problems convincing people to learn Scheme. I've even had people beg me to teach them Matlab as a first programming language, because that is the only language that they needed to get their work done. Telling them that Matlab's programming language is a creeping horror doesn't sway them at all.
Now, why so? I won't defend the Matlab language too strongly, but I used it for teaching scientific computations, I exploited the vectorized expressions, I used objects, and even a lot of functional constructs. I don't see any reason to call it a creeping horror. It is quite homogeneous and simple, and is decently interfaced.
Jerzy Karczmarczuk
It's incredibly inconsistent. To cite just one example, the syntax is geared towards the notion that "everything is a two-dimensional matrices of double-precision floating point numbers". If you want to have a three-dimensional array, you can do that, but the syntax is not going to be nearly as elegant, because matlab's array syntax doesn't scale at all. I haven't used matlab seriously for a few years (thankfully), but I vaguely recall several other instances of the same problem. Basically, matlab makes programming very easy within a very restricted domain, but if you want to go outside that domain, you will have to endure a lot of pain. That is not good language design. In contrast, Mathematica has a pretty consistent and elegant language. Mike