MATLAB: not just a programming environment
February 13, 2019
MATLAB: not just a programming environment
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with MATLAB
MATLAB is used across the entire University. There are network licenses that can be used in the many computer labs across campus, and thus can either be used by instructors within their courses or by students working on a project individually. MATLAB is used primarily to teach concepts of control systems, neural networks and to run computer simulations.
- A great high-level abstraction programming language that's very easy to learn yet extremely powerful for more advanced users to take advantage of its computing capabilities.
- Top notch documentation that's built directly into the programming environment and very well structured courses/workshops can be found online (free).
- Great support team and frequently updated application that's designed to make efficient use of modern Intel processor's available resources.
- Diverse types of licensing (students, professional, organizational) allow for flexible plans and can be customized to include the toolboxes you require for your specific use case.
- MATLAB should have a full free version (without time limit) in order to be more accessible and thus have a greater user community.
- The idea of having toolboxes to work directly with hardware (microcontrollers, single-board computers) is great, but one can tell it isn't updated very frequently and there isn't as much documentation available as with more common resources.
- Our organization had a lot of trouble getting our network licenses to work properly and there wasn't any local service provider that could help us get it to work faster.
- It has given us access to new programming tools and standards that we previously didn't have access to.
- It has created a lot of opportunities for our students to generate new projects that move our university forward and into new fields of study.
- It has allowed our faculty to experiment and simulate systems without having to create more expensive and resource hungry real-life models, saving us a lot in our budget.
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.