• 4 Posts
  • 39 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 18th, 2023

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  • I’m not sure how it works in the US but where I’m from, the way lessons are conducted are typically like this:

    1. Professors hand out lecture notes, typically in the PDF format. So, students will either print or just use their phones/laptops to follow along the lectures. It’s either this way, OR
    2. Professors will list out recommended readings for this course, and it’s up to you how you obtain the source material. Most people will probably just download the PDFs and take down notes during lectures.
    3. We were never required to buy any books.

    So I’m personally unfamiliar with the “shilling” of textbooks which cost up to hundreds of dollars for practically the same content, which, from what I’ve heard, is quite common in US colleges. This seems to be a very strange concept to me.



  • I think I get that as well. I used to talk quite a bit about open-source to my friends, but looking back, it seemed quite preachy (maybe because I was quite young at the time), and it never really changed anything. This is especially the case since open-source (or free software) is a philosophical approach to technology that many people might be unfamiliar with or simply don’t care about. I just simply use open-source software, supports devs/foundations, and only will talk the necessary bits if someone asks me about it.


  • I mentioned it to a couple of friends, but I think I didn’t get it across well to them that GNU Octave is supposed to be syntactically compatible with MATLAB. Also, they’re more comfortable using established software since everybody else is using them anyway.

    Speaking about numerical analysis courses, I feel like one should be able to choose what programming languages they wish; the course should just aim to teach the fundamentals/principles of numerical methods, not what language to use. I get that it is much more convenient to streamline software choice, but still, why not use Python over MATLAB for undergraduate introductory courses?



  • Yeah, I imagine this’d be the case. Especially since MATLAB is designed for heavyweight computation in engineering industries, not merely simple looping or graphs. I’ll be honest and say that I neither use MATLAB nor GNU Octave since my work does not require it; I was just recalling a particular story during my student days that I thought would be interesting to share. For such heavy, niche and always evolving set of toolboxes and libraries, we can reasonable expect no open-source alternative will be able to “replace” MATLAB in any meaningful sense, it’s just too powerful and big.

    I’m mostly okay with that though. These sorts of work are done in institutions or industries that can and should be able to afford them. It’s the reason why I don’t reasonably expect GIMP to overthrow Photoshop or Kdenlive/Openshot/Shotcut to overthrow Premiere Pro, unless somehow massive funds are channeled to their development. Rare cases like Linux or Blender or Firefox do happen, but they have massive backings.