On: Will there ever be another Red Hat?

[MadManE]

Anything that takes away from MatLab is good in my eyes. I have never had a good experience with it.

Granted, I've only ever used it for school, but it is always incredibly painful to work with. I like Octave much better.

[delecti → MadManE]

My biggest complaint about the uses I encountered in school is that it wasn't taught as a way to do things, it was taught as the way to do things.

It was never "here's what it means to do X, and here's how to do X in matlab", it was "to do X, do this in matlab".

It seems like one of those tools that fosters such thinking.

[MadManE → delecti]

Absolutely. My experience was that MatLab was used as a series of magic steps to accomplish what we were really after: analysis of physical systems.

The impression I get of MathWorks is that they would like to be the walled garden of engineering tools. Don't ask how it works, don't try to do it differently, just use these commands to do these certain things.