Re: Mathematica Vs. Matlab. It is not a superset

From: paul (paul_tan_at_aoI.com)
Date: 08/19/04 

Date: Thu, 19 Aug 2004 01:44:26 GMT

Mr. Fateman,

hmmm, reading the previous emails in this email chain, you were an ardent
opponent of any comparison of any kind between Mathematica and Matlab, you
were even rude to one of the folks in here, what happened Prof.? Now, here
you are making very nice comparisons and pointing out the differences in the
two software! What are we to make of your analysis, given you erratic
approach to this problem, first you claim it is absolutely lunatic to
suggest any kind of similarity between these two software and even compared
it to comparing McDonald Burger to Toyota Camry, and now couple of days
later, you are doing exactly that comparison!! What is really behind your
feverish hatred of Mathematica? Does it bother you to face the fact that
Mathematica is really much superior to Matlab? Or to face the fact that
Matlab is based on an old methodology of mathematical analysis, namely:
MATRIX manipulation??? Face it, Matlab tackles engineering problems in a
very non-intuitive manner, you MUST convert ALL problems into some sort of
Numerical Column-ated matrix format to be addressed in Matlab, which makes
it extremely un-natural to use for describing real world physics and
specially engineering problems. And Matlab does not lend itself to natural
language programming! You should check your underlying assumptions
carefully, and I suggest, before you jump on people's throats for their
questions, and accuse them of being clue-less and rudely almost call them
stupid, to really take a hard look at yourself and how your language
reflects on yourself and more importantly on the organization which is
represented by your email address! I don't think the Dean of your
university would be too happy with the kind of responses you have posted on
this specific chain. It's not worthy of a University professor, specially a
University of this Caliber! You are erratic and irresponsible, just go back
and review your own pattern in addressing this question! Your constant
posturing and personalizing attitude is completely distasteful and not
appropriate of a scientific discussion, your mannerism and tone is
completely insulting and almost vicious at times. You are supposed to be a
"TEACHER", not a DICTATOR! Your duty is to "promote" learning, not
"discourage" people from participating in discussions. Please be respectful
of all the members in the group, even if you don't care about your own
respect. And always remember, you are writing as if the Dean of University
was right there, reading it as you typed, then ask yourself if you would
write as you plan, if the answer is NO, then don't respond in such
pugnacious and distasteful manner!

Have a nice day Prof.
P.S. Remember, before you respond so quickly, take a moment and contemplate,
what if the Dean of my University was reading my letter, would I still
respond this way???!!!!!! Hmmmmmm........ I wonder............
Again, Have a wonderful and pleasant day Prof.

"Richard Fateman" <fateman@cs.berkeley.edu> wrote in message
news:tkjht4mdwn5w@legacy...
> On Wed, 18 Aug 2004 15:31:17 GMT, paul wrote:
> >Your report is more 2 years old! Mathematica 5.0 is a completely
> different animal,...
>
> Unfortunately not. It might seem to some people that Mathematica
> is just a superset of Matlab ... because a special case of a symbol
> is a number, and if Mathematica "does symbols" it must also "do
> numbers".
> And if speed is important, then Mathematica could be hacked (e.g. in
> version 5.0) to notice special cases of "all symbols in the problem
> are actually numbers" and then do the moral equivalent of calling
> Matlab, or "even faster" routines.
>
> Here are some problems of Mathematica that are not in Matlab.
> There are others.
>
> a. It gets unintuitive numerical answers because of its
> peculiar model of floating point numbers. Most users, faced with an
> answer 0, don't know to ask, "How accurate is that?" If it is not
> accurate at all, the answer could be anything at all.
>
> b. It converts some operations that should be done in linear time
> to quadratic time or worse because of its peculiar storage structures
> (Lists in particular, doing append, take O(n) time instead of O(1)).
>
> c. It is too complicated. Most instruction in Mathematica usage
> involves fooling the user into thinking he understands what he does
> not. E.g. "defining functions" is really "defining rules". The
> application order of rules is, in some cases unpredictable.
>
> More generally though, could a CAS be a superset of Matlab? I
> think it could be done in a much more sensible way than Matlab
> handles the merger, by making (symbolic Maple) a subset of Matlab.
>
> Nevertheless,
>
> Engineers at my school are keen advocates of Matlab and various of its
> toolkits, which seem to be able to do just the right things.
>
> But they seem to view computer algebra systems, to the extent that
> they are aware of them, as not appropriate for teaching in an
> "introduction to scientific computing for engineers" course. I have
> been unsuccessful in advocating a change to add a CAS for 25 years. Of
> course 25 years ago engineers were taught Fortran, and so Matlab was a
> big step forward.... Now if someone were to come up with a water-tight
> argument that Civil/Mechanical/Electrical/... engineers, in their core
> educational curriculum should learn Mathematica (or another CAS)
> instead of Matlab, I'd love to see it. My arguments have not convinced
> them. (In research they often want to do finite-element analysis with
> supercomputers etc. And Mathematica doesn't seem to do much for them.)
>
> Berkeley Engineering is top-ranked (along with Stanford and MIT) by
> most accounts.
>

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  • Re: Mathematica Vs. Matlab. It is not a superset
    ... > hmmm, reading the previous emails in this email chain, you were an ardent ... > opponent of any comparison of any kind between Mathematica and Matlab, ... > Mathematica is really much superior to Matlab? ... you are writing as if the Dean of University ...
    (sci.math.symbolic)
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