I started using MATLAB in 2001 when I was in my 10th grade (It was version 6.0 then!). Initially, it was just to gain some extra programming skills so I could get into a good college (and possibly grub for extra points/grades from the teacher!) but I have been using it regularly since I got into college (in 2003). Having had a couple years of 'fun' practice, I actually had an edge over my classmates. Today I am a qualified engineer (thrice over!!!) and of all the programming languages I have learned and used, I still find it easiest to work with MATLAB. I've often had it pointed out to me that this is the only editing software I use (for photos, audios, videos or you name it!). It is my programming language of choice and I like teaching it (my youngest student was 9 years old) as much as I love using it. This is my way of paying forward!

Image Analyst on 2 Aug 2016

Nice story. Speaking from personal experience, the University of Arizona is tops in the world when it comes to astronomy and optics.

James Brown on 1 Aug 2016

I first encountered Matlab in 1985 as an undergrad at University of Arizona. My interest then was signal processing; Matlab was well-suited for that and I loved it. I continued to use it through graduate work and on into my professional life. I'm now a senior controls engineer working at an astronomical telescope facility. When I joined this team over 20 years ago, many physicists here thought Matlab was a mere toy; they insisted on sticking to Fortran 77 for their analyses. I quickly converted many to Matlab and it is now our tool of choice for most of our work. Analysts use it to reduce data while I use Matlab with Simulink and SLRT to deploy complicated controls applications.

Abdul Mannan on 18 Jan 2015

I started using MATLAB in 2005. I was in my college. In beginning it was very strange and complicated because I was not familiar with programming. At that time, I could only use step(sys) command. After learning C programming, I realized power of MATLAB for control and image processing. I was obsessed with MATLAB at that time. It was the point where I hit my first IEEE publications and it was just because of MATLAB. I belong to poor country PAKISTAN, where we don't have good faculty and good resources to excel in science. MATLAB is like a heaven for Engineers there. Now, I am doing PhD from Hanyang Unviersity, South Korea and It would never be possible without MATLAB. Thanks to MATLAB.

Marco on 14 Mar 2014

I knew I would need to learn a programming language to get scientific data (images) analyzed, something I always wanted to do. I made an intensive study on what programming language might suite my needs best - not beeing a genius in mathematics and abstract thinking at all, and quickly being frightened by a syntax which contains more cryptic " void ^¨.:=;(?{[@ " signs than readable code. That was 13 years ago. That time I decide to learn MATLAB - because of its philosophy to be as an interpreted language suitable to be used for rapid prototyping and - other than many of the free of purchasing cost alternatives - coming with a lot of professional documentation, something I decided to pay for with my little student budget. Furthermore I got the message that images or stacks of images are matrices and many loop programming could be avoided in the code by the matrix orientated syntax of MATLAB. Code appeared intuitively readable. Unfortunately other (also very interesting) laboratory work on other topics never left enough free time and no justification to do so during official work time to really go for any programming. Until some 9 month ago! I repeated my search for the proper language and came to the same conclusion as years ago, mainly (in comparison to very hot alternatives) because of the documentation aspect, and because MATLAB seems to be able to call functions from the hot alternatives / connect well to other function libraries. The documentation is very important for me as an autodidact not having any teacher around - besides the internet community, and having a rapid prototyping environment as the control center which can connect and incorporate other function libaries and other languages code if needed, sounded great. And my frist baby is born now - 9 month later. I can simulate my current laboratory experiment in silico and derive information from my simulation parameters for understanding what the hell is going on in my unordinary drifting experiment. And I fullfilled a dream of mine: I am finally programming some image analysis - officially at work! Well, I encounter more and more that I just have to get used to cryptic syntax. The @ is almost not frightening me anymore, I am too much busy with still getting more comfortable with the different meaning of {} () and [].

John Petersen on 13 Mar 2014

I was introduced to Matlab by Herm Schutten way back in 1988 while just starting graduate school. I quickly grew to love it. A few years later I was trying to decide what programming language to be "good" at. I was thinking about C and Fortran. But then I decided I'd rather program in Matlab. So I decided that would be my forte. I still found it necessary to program in C and Fortran and even other languages, but my experience with Matlab did not hinder me at all. As people grew to know I knew Matlab I became more of a goto guy for that and got to do more and more with it. I've moved around a bit (7 times). For each of these job changes I have made I have insisted on having Matlab. I've seen quite a bit of evolution with Matlab, but it's mostly been welcomed. I'm glad I made the good decision to stick to Matlab. It has been a great asset for me. Thankyou Mathworks!

MUNNANGI ANIRUDH on 22 Jan 2014

I learnt about a software called matlab back in 2009 and i thought it was "just" one of the regular tools. I now know how wrong i was back then, as matlab is such a wondrous tool that has changed my "just" an engineering experience to the ultimate engineering experience.

I saw matlab as Matlab 7.0 and in those days it used to come in a compact disk ( :P ). Now we see Matlab R2013a/b and you need a high memory flash drive or hard drive to keep it.

The journey from Matlab 7.0 to R2013a/b has been quite an enriching one. It has been equally inspiring. I was an undergraduate student back then and i was the only one who knew Matlab and was called "The Matlab Guy". I have dedicated a lot of time in helping others with matlab and inspiring them about the software and its benefits. Now after four and half years, i am in different country but definitely in the same position. I am still the best in matlab. Here many know about it though, but i have got something called experience and thus i use it to solve bigger problems and challenges.

It all drops down to the dedication and interest one has towards the awesome tool which keeps us going ahead and ahead day by day, script by script, run by run. I believe everyone does the same and uphold the true value of education which is to share knowledge ! Just in our case, the knowledge to be shared is "how to apply knowledge ;)"

Enjoy Matlab !

Cedric on 23 Jul 2013

I started using MATLAB in 95, but I didn’t get serious about it until 97. Being more of a "low level" programming and electronics engineering guy (uP/uC systems) at that time, I had worked with several assembly languages, C, Pascal, and Fortran, prior to really starting with scientific computing. From 97 on, I have been using essentially MATLAB/C for engineering projects, Sysquake for building highly interactive demonstrators (MATLAB syntax "compatible" and really worth the try), Mathematica for physics and mathematics, and Python for data pre/post processing and for "gluing things together". I slowly shifted towards MATLAB as this is where my projects lead me. Now I am essentially mixing MALTAB, Python, and ArcGIS, even though people who know me are likely to call me a MATLAB evangelist ;-)

Cheers,

Cedric

dpb on 6 Jul 2013

Indeed...some have been very handy in an off-list mentoring situation last month w/ a Indian student studying in Sweden while working as an (apprently unpaid) summer intern in Berlin. Wouldn'ta happened when I was his age...

Not sure how much more TMW would want me to let out of the bag here...I do still have intentions of looking at some that I haven't gotten to yet with respect to some ag production areas on the farm that I thought might be an area for another direction for toolboxes to head...but, w/ the severe drought I'll have to get some previous data to even get started as we had essentially no production of winter wheat this year.

dpb on 5 Jul 2013

It's a long time coming, but... :) Hadn't seen this owing to not having switched from cs-sm.

Is interesting to hear the stories/experiences--after reading the others to date I appear to be even older -- my first copy of Matlab was V3 altho after a search I can't seem to locate it any longer to find the actual date. It must have been sometime in mid- to late-80s, though. By that time I had 10 years of programming (virtually all FORTRAN from IBM 1620 at uni to Philco 2000 followed by CDC-6600/Cyber-7600 doing support and development of large (by the standards of the day's capacities--even the 7600 had only 64k 60-bit core memory and up to 512k-words of secondary memory) nuclear design codes for commercial power applications for a reactor vendor followed by almost another 10 year of consulting work where the variety was wide but still almost all FORTRAN but by then on VAXen/DEC10 w/ a tiny bit of IBM 370 thrown in just to be able to curse JCL.

At the time and the impetus for purchasing Matlab was I had been doing failure modes and effects analyses on reactor control systems which entail reading every schematic (of which there were several thousand) and by hand, writing down the action of each and every controlled element and aux output contact given a loss of power to that particular element. After that was compiled into a database, it was then necessary to aggregate all elements on each power supply at and below each branch point and then propagate a hypothetical failure at that point thru the entire rest of the system and ultimately assess the state of the plant and safety implications of that state. The real pressure of the job was that it was verified by actually going to the plant in question and pulling a fuse at a given point and observing state and comparing to the database.

I was desperately looking for ways to implement the logic to be able to automate this process and link controlled components to their circuits and them, in turn to the power node hierarchy. I had not succumbed to the PC craze until the AT and when employer offered and interest-free payroll deduction plan, I bought (for a mere $4000+) an AST 8(!)-MHz/AT w/ 1 (whole!) MB of memory. I had at that time also been involved with a robotics effort that was implemented in Forth and was strongly influenced by the power of "defining words"--a mechanism by which one could build runtime code that was dependent on the data supplied. I worked on the problem down that vein for a while before deciding it wasn't what was looking for and then a PC/AT Smalltalk was released. Again, it had promise but didn't have the facilities was really looking for.

So, I then heard of Matlab and thought the array syntax and similarity of the language to Fortran that I knew much better than Smalltalk might be a solution. In the end, that also never totally panned out altho I was able to do some small-scale problems with it I was again unable to implement what I really wanted which was essentially a reactor controls simulator w/ power loss response capability. Twenty/thirty some years later I think I now actually have learned enough to now know how one might implement such! :) (I will note that all of the above efforts were not done as part of the paying "day job" but were moonlighting efforts on top of actually plodding along on the actual analyses by hand so it wasn't quite like I was getting uninterrupted periods to work on it. In the consulting game we were competing against several other vendors for a dwindling amount of business and I was hoping if I could build a toolset I could underbid the competition as well as not have to work 16-hr days to meet deliverables.)

Meanwhile, doing that I began to appreciate what Matlab could do for other computational areas and continued to use it off and on as individual projects arose where it was aptly suited; primarily the graphics that was well ahead of anything else available to me at the time other than the Tek workstations or drawing Calcomp paper plots from the VAX w/ DISSPLA.

After that point my directions again switched to supporting mostly the fossil utilities rather than nuclear and were directed mostly to controls and instrumentation and development of new techniques for pulverized coal flow. In those, visualization and signal processing were key areas.

As for learning, it's all been a very long-term case of osmosis and as another said while he had 3+ yr of Matlab experience the 25+ of programming was probably key in the ability to simply switch implementation languages as opposed to starting programming from the beginning.

I recall my first FORTRAN on the Philco in '68 was a pretty feeble piece of code albeit it did get the job done (eventually). I'm sure if I had had no more experience when first installed Matlab as did when punched the first card deck I'd have been at least as inept... :)