What parts of MATLAB would you not miss?
Walter Roberson
on 21 Feb 2011
Are there parts of MATLAB that could disappear as far as you were concerned, things you don't need or which were "bad ideas" or which cause more trouble than they are worth in your experience?
One suggestion per answer please, so we can see how other people feel about the same matters.
104 Comments
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Global variables. A crutch that causes more problems then they will ever solve.
UINT64, INT64. Yes, these classes give us a slightly larger integer range than a double. Better in my eyes would have just been to introduce a quad precision class, that would have solved more problems, and still have given a significantly larger FLINT than either of those integer classes.
DET (and to some extent INV.) Yes, I use them both at times, as they both certainly have their uses. Yet they are both heavily misused by many. Do you see an inverse in an equation? We need inv! Need to test for singularity? Just use det! Det is the worst of the two of course in terms of frequency of misuse and the problems that arise from that misuse. I put the blame for this on the teacher who teaches a concept without also teaching the flaws.
RUN. Never had a use for it, never will. I think it encourages the writing of scripts too much instead of functions.
EVAL is evil. Top of the list for me. ;-)
I just thank god they never gave us goto in MATLAB.
cell arrays of character vectors. String arrays are better in may ways, but matlab is replete with cell arrays of character vectors. Too bad string arrays were not developed first in matlab.
Tim Harmon: Depending on your license and what you need to use MATLAB to do, this may be possible. See MATLAB Online.
Installing MatLab
\
Admin permission required to install python API. No other python modules I have ever used require this:
https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/matlab_external/install-the-matlab-engine-for-python.html?s_tid=srchtitle
Now that I've been forced into Linux at work, I wouldn't miss ls for a minute. It behaves horribly compared to in Windows, and means my code is not cross platform.
I've spent the last 2 days replacing every instance with
a = dir();
a = {a.name}';
Wow... people actually use LS in code? My commiserations!
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