Anaconda vs. MATLAB vs. Microsoft Visual Studio

I have asked all my juniors to work with Anaconda and Pycharm only, as this is the best combination for now. Coming to use cases: 1. When you have multiple applications using multiple Python variants, it is a really good tool instead of Venv (I never like it). 2. If you have to work on multiple tools and you are someone who needs to work on data analytics, development, and machine learning, this is good. 3. If you have to work with both R and Python, then also this is a good tool, and it provides support for both.

Incentivized

MATLAB really does best for solving computational problems in math and engineering. Especially when you have to use a lot of functions in your solving process, or if you have a nonlinear equation that must be iteratively solved. [MATLAB] can also perform things like integration and derivation on your equations that you put into it.

Incentivized

When working with base C# code for desktop and web projects, then Microsoft Visual Studio is ideal as it provides the libraries and interfaces needed to quickly create, test and deploy solutions. It is when slightly more complex scenarios are required that issues can arise. The built-in integration for things like PowerBI Paginated Reports and dashboards is far from ideal.

Incentivized

• Anaconda is a one-stop destination for important data science and programming tools such as Jupyter, Spider, R etc.
• Anaconda command prompt gave flexibility to use and install multiple libraries in Python easily.
• Jupyter Notebook, a famous Anaconda product is still one of the best and easy to use product for students like me out there who want to practice coding without spending too much money.

Incentivized

• It has a very user friendly library which helps users learn this software fairly quickly in a short span of time.
• The graphical user interface provided by the software is really good.
• The code that a person writes allows options for debugging.
• One can visualize the flow of control of their code inside MATLAB.

Incentivized

• I like how the tabs and panels are organized; everything is gathered together so you can find what you're looking for quickly.
• If you can't find something, there's a thorough search engine that searches all of Visual Studio's features.
• The Team Foundation Server feature is fantastic since it allows us to easily deploy and roll back changes on the server.

• It can have a cloud interface to store the work.
• Compatible for large size files.
• I used R Studio for building Machine Learning models, Many times when I tried to run the entire code together the software would crash. It would lead to loss of data and changes I made.

Incentivized

• MatLab is pricier than most of its competitors and because of this reason, many organizations are moving towards cheaper alternatives - mostly Python.
• MatLab is inefficient when it comes to performing a large number of iterations. It gets laggy and often crashes. Python is better in this regard.
• There is a limited number of hardware options (mostly NI) that can be connected directly to the data acquisition toolbox.

Incentivized

• Would be great if there was a better way to save and restore open tabs.
• The built-in test runner can be improved, for example, by adding the ability to save a set of commonly run tests, etc.
• Better integration for Microsoft SQL server would be great.

Incentivized

It's really good at data processing, but needs to grow more in publishing in a way that a non-programmer can interact with. It also introduces confusion for programmers that are familiar with normal Python processes which are slightly different in Anaconda such as virtualenvs.

Incentivized

VS is the best and is required for building Microsoft applications. The quality and usefulness of the product far out-weight the licensing costs associated with it.

Incentivized

I am giving this rating because I have been using this tool since 2017, and I was in college at that time. Initially, I hesitated to use it as I was not very aware of the workings of Python and how difficult it is to manage its dependency from project to project. Anaconda really helped me with that. The first machine-learning model that I deployed on the Live server was with Anaconda only. It was so managed that I only installed libraries from the requirement.txt file, and it started working. There was no need to manually install cuda or tensor flow as it was a very difficult job at that time. Graphical data modeling also provides tools for it, and they can be easily saved to the system and used anywhere.

Incentivized

MATLAB is pretty easy to use. You can extend its capabilities using the programming interface. Very flexible capabilities when it comes to graphical presentation of your data (so many different kinds of options for your plotting needs). Anytime you are working with large data sets, or with matrices, MATLAB is likely to be very helpful.

Incentivized

I love the overall usability of Microsoft Visual Studio. I’ve been using this IDE for more than 20 years, and I’ve seen it evolve by leaps and bounds. Today, with AI and code-suggestion/completion features, developers no longer need to remember countless libraries, methods, or language syntax, or invest a huge amount of programming effort to complete a project. It truly offers everything a developer needs to program, debug, test, and deploy in a single IDE.

Incentivized

Anaconda provides fast support, and a large number of users moderate its online community. This enables any questions you may have to be answered in a timely fashion, regardless of the topic. The fact that it is based in a Python environment only adds to the size of the online community.

Incentivized

The built-in search engine is not as performing as I wish it would be. However, the YouTube channel has a vast library of informative video that can help understanding the software. Also, many other software have a nice bridge into MATLAB, which makes it very versatile. Overall, the support for MATLAB is good.

Incentivized

There are many resources available supporting Visual Studio IDE. Microsoft whitepapers, forum posts, and online Visual Studio documentation. There are countless demonstration videos available, as well. If users are having issues, they can call Microsoft Support, but depending on the company's agreement with Microsoft, the number of included support calls will vary from organization to organization. I've found that Microsoft support calls can be hit or miss depending on who you get, but they can usually get you with the right support person for your issue.

Incentivized

IT is very complicated to understand all the functions that the environment has if you are not familiar with this type of development environments. It is important to select a good in-person training to achieve to understand all the possibilities and the capacity of the application. In this case, you will be able to develop a lot type of different applications.

Incentivized

If you are not accustomed to develop in this type of development environments it would be complicated to follow all the parts of the course because if the course does not include a great tour with all the concepts to develop you will not have the option to understand all the functions.

Incentivized

I have experience using RStudio oustide of Anaconda. RStudio can be installed via anaconda, but I like to use RStudio separate from Anaconda when I am worin in R. I tend to use Anaconda for python and RStudio for working in R. Although installing libraries and packages can sometimes be tricky with both RStudio and Anaconda, I like installing R packages via RStudio. However, for anything python-related, Anaconda is my go to!

Incentivized

How MATLAB compares to its competition or similar open access tools like R (programming language) or SciLab is that it's simply more powerful and capable. It embraces a wider spectrum of possibilities for far more fields than any other environment. R, for example, is intended primarily for the area of statistical computing. SciLab, on the other hand, is a similar open access tool that falls very short in its computing capabilities. It's much slower when running larger scripts and isn't documented or supported nearly as well as MATLAB.

Incentivized

I personally feel Visual Studio IDE has [a] better interface and [is more] user friendly than other IDEs. It has better code maintainability and intellisense. Its inbuilt team foundation server help coders to check on their code then and go. Better nugget package management, quality testing and gives features to extract TRX file as result of testing which includes all the summary of each test case.

• It has helped our organization to work collectively faster by using Anaconda's collaborative capabilities and adding other collaboration tools over.
• By having an easy access and immediate use of libraries, developing times has decreased more than 20 %
• There's an enormous data scientist shortage. Since Anaconda is very easy to use, we have to be able to convert several professionals into the data scientist. This is especially true for an economist, and this my case. I convert myself to Data Scientist thanks to my econometrics knowledge applied with Anaconda.

Incentivized

• MATLAB helps us quickly sort through large sets of data because we keep the same script each time we run an analyzation, making it very efficient to run this whole process.
• The software makes it super easy for us to create plots that we can then show to investors or clients to display our data.
• We are also looking to create an app for our product, and we will not be able to do that on MATLAB, therefore creating a limiting issue and a new learning curve for a programming language.

Incentivized

• Using the integration between Visual Studio and our source control service, the cost of re-work and losing code is drastically reduced.
• Paid versions of Visual Studio enable developers to be so much more productive than hacked-together open source solutions that it's hard to imagine developing in Windows without it.
• When combined with support subscriptions and the vast array of free online help options available, Visual Studio saves our developers time by keeping them coding and testing, not wasting their time trying to guess their way out of problems or spend endless hours online hoping to find answers.

Incentivized