mafbar

I'm not sure what would have happened had I insisted. I imagine that they'd probably ask us to obtain it on our own though, based on my memory that they were insistent that everybody must have it.

I see. That's a bit rough that we require proprietary software to graduate.

That's an interesting perspective actually, since it gets into all sorts of weirdness and trickiness of the intellectual property concept. Perhaps because of two factors: (i) we treat digital data as fundamentally different from physical objects, and (ii) theft intuitively implies that the original object is no longer with the owner, but with piracy, you're simply making a copy-and-paste, rather than a cut-and-paste.

I think that's ideal! It's supposed to be a lesson on numerical methods, not MATLAB.

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.

Yea of course but we're talking about piracy, so when we pirate proprietary software, they'll of object with "nothing is free, you gotta pay". It's either we pay for that, or fundamentally uphold piracy as some means or some ends, or use and support open-source software. Not a lot of choices, really.

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?

I'm not sure about that since I'm not in any field that requires MATLAB at the moment. However, my specific case is for undergraduate introductory courses, and perhaps even at schools. To go even beyond this conversation a bit, any numerical / computational / algorithmic principles should probably be taught using Python. I had another numerical methods course where students can use any language they want, either C or C++ or Python. So I know it's possible.

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.

I agree with that. It's much easier streamlining software choice rather than letting people choose their own alternatives, since it's a mess to integrate workflows and all that.

My issue is that we're basically forced to pirate for an introductory course, where I actually don't even think it's necessary to use MATLAB. You can use GNU Octave or even Python. It's quite frustrating.

It's probably the main reason why I think most open-source software will never be able to replace their proprietary counterpart: the fact that proprietary software are typically developed for either massive or highly niche industries, and so they are funded and are basically now integrated inside the ecosystem of such industries. As people use it more and more, Mathworks will develop more toolboxes with hardware integration, until it basically becomes the de facto software for that purpose (e.g. computation). I'm all for open-source software, but I don't see a way out of it. Big companies with mega budgets can always improve their software, far outpacing any alternative open-source projects.

I don't use MATLAB nor GNU Octave for my work, but I imagine that the hardware that I'll operate on probably require MATLAB, and so there's no incentive for me to use GNU Octave, especially if it has poor hardware support or lack of toolboxes or whatever such issues. This is a natural consequence of open-source alternatives being built from scratch typically with volunteers. That's insane to me that GNU Octave is still somewhat usable for some basic computational work.