> Given that I'm a physics major and will probably be encountering matlab quite frequently, I sure hope that it won't be so horribly documented, and just so unreadable.
Coming from another physics major... don't get your hopes up. Just do your thing and hope that others follow suit.
> I was so offended, I had to rewrite over 2000 lines of code in python, and on completion, the python code was a little of 700 lines, clean, and so god-damn readable.
It's amazing how easy it is to rack up 2000 lines of matlab repmat mashing. On the bright side, at least your lab didn't insist that you stick with their nightmare of .m files.
> the first computational physics course we will be taking at our university teaches us python
Indeed, that should be fairly pleasant. Particularly because you can easily implement a lot of the iterative algorithms without needing to translate all of the mathematical 1-indexed stuff into c-like 0-indexed memory. Can't tell you how many bugs I had because of that.
My first comp phys course was taught using only barebones C. We had to implement all the numerical routines from scratch, with nothing but stuff like stdlib.h, math.h, etc. In later courses they allowed us to use whatever we wanted really, but often the techniques would be very complex and the prof would provide some matlab code for us (e.g. an n-dimensional meshing routine) that was too much of a hassle to re-implement, so I ended up doing a lot of it in matlab anyhow :-/
Coming from another physics major... don't get your hopes up. Just do your thing and hope that others follow suit.
> I was so offended, I had to rewrite over 2000 lines of code in python, and on completion, the python code was a little of 700 lines, clean, and so god-damn readable.
It's amazing how easy it is to rack up 2000 lines of matlab repmat mashing. On the bright side, at least your lab didn't insist that you stick with their nightmare of .m files.
> the first computational physics course we will be taking at our university teaches us python
Indeed, that should be fairly pleasant. Particularly because you can easily implement a lot of the iterative algorithms without needing to translate all of the mathematical 1-indexed stuff into c-like 0-indexed memory. Can't tell you how many bugs I had because of that.
My first comp phys course was taught using only barebones C. We had to implement all the numerical routines from scratch, with nothing but stuff like stdlib.h, math.h, etc. In later courses they allowed us to use whatever we wanted really, but often the techniques would be very complex and the prof would provide some matlab code for us (e.g. an n-dimensional meshing routine) that was too much of a hassle to re-implement, so I ended up doing a lot of it in matlab anyhow :-/