I would just like to share a story, and probably an opinion as well. When I was doing my STEM undergraduate degree a couple of years ago, I took a course in which I had to use MATLAB. I won’t disclose too much information, but it was a course involving computation.
Well, we (the students) weren’t given a student/institutional license of any sort, but the course coordinator still insisted on using MATLAB. We took it as an implicit instruction to “somehow” obtain MATLAB. In the end, one guy in our class pirated it and distributed it the whole class.
Before that though, I did approach my course coordinator, asking them if it’s possible to use other software like GNU Octave, which is a clone of MATLAB. Personally I think it should also possible to use any other programming language like Python for example, since the important part is the computation part, in my opinion. They refused any discussion and did not even consider alternatives, instead basically forcing us to “obtain” MATLAB. How else? Well.
As I have said, we all pirated it in the end.
I did something quite interesting though, which is that for every quiz, assignment, and projects that we had, I’ll run the same exact MATLAB code on GNU Octave, to see if it’s compatible. And it is. It works flawlessly. There’s only one function that GNU Octave didn’t support back the (this was a couple of years ago), and even then, it wasn’t an essential feature, you could use other software for that function as well.
By the end of that semester, I had compiled almost all input/output of the MATLAB code alongside its GNU Octave’s counterpart, to demonstrate that we didn’t need to pirate MATLAB to get through this undergraduate course.
Regrettably though, I didn’t follow through. So sad!
Do you think piracy is justified in this case?
The fact that numerical analysis courses still shill Matlab is just incomprehensible to me. All the computer sessions can easily be done with no change of syntax using either GNU Octave or Scilab, or if one is ready to change languages, Python + NumPy. The professors who still keep shilling Matlab should be fired.
I had a numerical methods class where the prof let us do the assignments in whatever language we wanted. It was nice because 1) fuck MATLAB, and 2) I’m a shill for Julia, so I got to do all my assignments in Julia. I saw on github at least one previous student for the course had done their assignments in Fortran. I suspect the vast majority did their assignments in Python, though.
I think that’s ideal! It’s supposed to be a lesson on numerical methods, not MATLAB.
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?
also, give a try at Qalc’s cli mode (with an input file as a list of equations), I think it’s really really powerful. Its ability to add an unknown or unit to any expression is so much more useful than Matlab-like symbolic systems.