On 11/05/05, Jerzy Karczmarczuk
Michael Vanier comments my defense of Matlab:
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.
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.
Come on... Matlab has cells and the full object-oriented layer nowadays. There are short ints, strings, complex numbers, etc. The extensibility is good. The overall consistency is reasonable.
I had to use it a bit for a class and it was *PURE PAIN* beyond the simplest of things.
Syntax for 3D arrays? Give me one single language where this is natural and immediate.
Numerical Python! Yes, the syntax is Python's, but the syntax doesn't really do much of anything unless you use it with Numeric. Anyway, the syntax is quite uniform and general. You can use it for any number of dimensions (including 0!). -- Sam