Comments on: Matlab, Python, or R… Time versus Money

By: Travis Oliphant

Travis Oliphant — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 03:29:28 +0000

I’m curious if you’ve tried the Enthought Python Distribution (EPD)?

It makes installation of a lot of great tools very easy.

http://www.enthought.com/epd

By: xenocoder

xenocoder — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 16:32:23 +0000

Hey Gabriel,

thanks for the comment. It’s funny, I just installed Octave through MacPorts the other night and will it another try. The last time I played with Octave was close to 10 years ago and at that time for me there was no comparison with Matlab. I know that Octave has come a long way and I’m excited to try it again. Thanks also for the Rscript command hint, I’ll definitely check that out!

By: Gabriel

Gabriel — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 12:19:13 +0000

Have you tried octave? Seems like it would be a better fit if you want to harness your matlab knowledge. With octave-forge it is a pretty awesome package.

Also for R you can use the Rscript command from the command line to have a more script driven feel.

By: xenocoder

xenocoder — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 20:07:07 +0000

Hey Jamii,

thanks to the feedback here I have taken a look at it, and that really does look like a good solution. I wasted too much time today trying to activate Matlab, but when I get some free time I will give it a go.

Thanks again for the comment!

By: jamii

jamii — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 20:02:08 +0000

Have you had a look at sage? Its a set of python wrappers around R, octave etc. Its means you can use lots of free tools but only have to learn one way of doing things.

http://www.sagemath.org/

By: xenocoder

xenocoder — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 05:21:47 +0000

Hey thanks! I appreciate that link, and it seems to support my current line of thinking, plus give me some nice leads to follow (e.g. Rpy). I did buckle down and get what I needed to done in Python today, and learned a lot about filtering and sorting multidimensional arrays. What’s nice is that in Matlab I would end up converting everything in an array to numerics (dates included) where in python I can mix type easily.

Thanks Again.

By: paddy3118

paddy3118 — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 04:52:11 +0000

You might get something from this current comp.lang.python thread:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/browse_frm/thread/e89a43251ce76a45/0b27d6c674b1fff9?lnk=raot#0b27d6c674b1fff9

- Paddy.