Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] Matlab interface to USRP

[Tom Rondeau]

Eric Blossom wrote:
> I have no interest in supporting an interface to MATLAB, or any other
> proprietary software for that matter.  I'd be much more interested in
> working with Octave, or better yet, working up an excellent
> interface to scipy.   Just because EE's are trained in MATLAB, doesn't
> mean that it's even a reasonable tool to use.   Do you know of any
> other language the allows only a single externally visible function
> PER FILE???  Come on folks, stop drinking the kool-aid.
>   

Absolutely. Matlab has been far too long teaching poor coding practices 
to upcoming SDR and signal processing engineers. It's a horrible 
language that is really a very bad teaching tool for the future 
challenges we face.

> matplotlib supports pretty much all the high-level plotting features
> found in MATLAB, and does it in Python, a language that provides a lot
> more leverage than MATLAB.  scipy's got all the linear algebra, and
> and ever expanding set of functions / toolboxes.
>   

Scipy, numpy, and matplotlib have completely replaced my indoctrinated 
use of Matlab from my EE undergrad days. They have almost as much in 
their toolbase (if you are willing to pay the extra $200 for the Comms 
toolbox, which requires the extra $200 for the signal processing toolbox 
you get a few neat features not included in the free software world), 
run faster, and actually use real coding practices like objects and 
callback functions. No, I don't consider how Matlab does them to be real 
objects or real callback functions.

This has been a recent campaign of mine, so I had to add something to 
the discussion.

Tom