What are the obsessions you saw in MATLAB Answers or in MATLAB programming?

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Those obsessions that seem to persist but not necessarly good.

Answers (4)

madhan ravi
madhan ravi on 9 Oct 2020
Edited: madhan ravi on 9 Oct 2020
Have to use MATLAB even for a simple calculation eventhough it could be done in mind.

Image Analyst
Image Analyst on 12 Oct 2020
  1. Those who say they can't use built-in functions but when pressed and asked why, and if it's homework, will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid disclosing that it's homework.
  2. Those who, after being provided with simple demos they can adapt, say they're beginners and can't do it, and can I do it for them.
  3. Those who accept the shortest answer, not the best answer because they think a longer self explanatory solution with descriptive variable names, lots of comments, and graphs and figures to show results, just looks too complicated, even if the shorter solution they accepted is more cryptic for beginners (like it uses anonymous functions, cellfun(), bsxfun(), arrayfun(), regular expressions, etc.) and they have to come back and ask for an explanation of it.
  4. Those obsessed with getting a fast solution who blow right past the posting guidelines, which leads to several back and forth clarifying questions from us to get the info they should have posted in the first place if they had just read the posting guidelines. Contrary to what they think, this actually makes it take longer for them to get a working solution.
  5. Those who won't post code or data, despite being repeatedly asked directly. They are obsessed with the idea that we should be able to read their mind and give the solution after having seen only a snippet of their code.
Hopefully no one will think that we are "mean" because we're posting these (like this poster). After all, we just want to provide them the best solution in the fastest amount of time, with the least effort by us.

Fangjun Jiang
Fangjun Jiang on 9 Oct 2020
Edited: Fangjun Jiang on 29 Jan 2022
I will start with the popular ones
  1. No-looper: don't want to use for-loop
  2. One-liner: Must get the result in one line of code
  3. Golfer: want to get the result with the least number of characters
Collected from other answers
4. MATLABer: Have to use MATLAB for every task
5. Bob-the-builder: Can't use any built-in functions
6. For-looper: Always want to use for-loop
  4 Comments
DGM
DGM on 29 Jan 2022
6b. While-looper: uses while-loops instead of for-loops unnecessarily; calamity ensues.
Image Analyst
Image Analyst on 29 Jan 2022
Right, usually because they don't put in a failsafe to bail out of the loop if the number of iterations exceeds a predetermined number of iterations and so they get an infinite loop. While loops should always have a loop counter as a failsafe.

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Image Analyst
Image Analyst on 29 Jan 2022
Another obsession is image processing novices who always want to do edge detection as the first step in any image processing task regardless if it's the proper thing to do or not. Just because you can see edges doesn't mean you need to find them. Often/usually the edges are not closed and then they ask how to close the perimeters. Usually a simple thresholding will find the objects of interest and is better than an edge detection.

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