From: Joel VanderWerf Date: 2006-02-03T07:58:18+09:00 Subject: Re: neuroimage software - scientific computing and visualization Phil Tomson wrote: > In article <1138790704.505109.135060@g44g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>, > anne001 wrote: ... >> I don't know how much stats ruby can do, certainly the matlab stat >> package is not complete, but I can't imagine that a programming >> language would be that developed in this area. >> >> Another reason to stay with matlab is readability. Matlab is a higher >> level language. It sounds like you are a programmer selling a product, >> so it might be different, but I work at a university, and students >> inherit the matlab programs from one another, and then typically they >> have to figure out what the program does to get the data in correctly >> for their data, get the figures they want for their conditions... the >> fact that it is written in a higher level language seems to help. > > YMMV. I don't find Matlab very readable. I much prefer Ruby's syntax. Unless MATLAB has changed in the last 3 or 4 years, it's a real pain to work with objects, as opposed to numbers. The problem I could not overcome was that all assignments have copy semantics rather than reference semantics. There was no way to take a reference to an object and assign that to a variable or to a field in some structure. So is was effectively impossible to build data structures whose reference graphs were not trees. -- vjoel : Joel VanderWerf : path berkeley edu : 510 665 3407