I sent a mail to Dr. Qiao, who'll be teaching Sfwr 2S03-Intro to programming principles asking as to which programming languages we will be dealing with next year. His reply was-MATLAB. Any thoughts/opinions?

Fun. Good Luck Youll need it for Z03 and ZZ3 aswell.

Sounds like it's going to be a bit different than what we had before. MATLAB is good to know.

But is Matlab even useful practically? Like when working for firms?

You guys are really lucky. You will be better prepared for some of those crazy MATLAB assignments for the two math courses.

Originally Posted by Kanishka

But is Matlab even useful practically? Like when working for firms?

Surprisingly, yes. Its used.

Originally Posted by blackdragon

Surprisingly, yes. Its used.

thats good to know!

Wtf?! Matlab!? Matlab is NOT a programming language. VB6 is more of a programming language than matlab is...

I really hope the guy wasn't being serious...

But is Matlab even useful practically? Like when working for firms?

It's good to know if you do basically any kind of engineering that isn't software :p.

Mathworks says Matlab is a language of technical computing and MATLAB® is a high-level language and interactive environment that enables you to perform computationally intensive tasks faster than with traditional programming languages such as C, C++, and Fortran.

if software students will be doing matlab, does it mean that Comp Eng students will do MatLab too in their Principles of Programming(2SH4) course?

Originally Posted by Kanishka

if software students will be doing matlab, does it mean that Comp Eng students will do MatLab too in their Principles of Programming(2SH4) course?

That was the plan, but last year Dr.Doyle crammed matlab in the last 3 lectures.. and we were not tested on it (even though we were suppose to be). But, we got a good taste of it in 2Z03 and 2FH3 (EW...)

Originally Posted by Kanishka

Mathworks says Matlab is a language of technical computing and MATLAB® is a high-level language and interactive environment that enables you to perform computationally intensive tasks faster than with traditional programming languages such as C, C++, and Fortran.

Notice how they avoided saying programming language . Matlab is optimized to run math scripts, and only that. You can't actually make anything in matlab in terms of a product.

Dr. Wassyng even said it's far from being an actual programming language. I don't see why they would use that in a class teaching the fundamentals of imperative and functional programming :s.

I know Qiao is also teaching a 3rd year scientific computation class for software engineers where it is all matlab. Maybe he got confused and thought you were talking about that?

Matlab is a Scripting language

Originally Posted by Ownaginatios

I know Qiao is also teaching a 3rd year scientific computation class for software engineers where it is all matlab. Maybe he got confused and thought you were talking about that?

lol...maybe he still doesn't know he'll be teaching this course.

i work as a research assistant here at Mac and I can tell you Matlab is definitely a serious language. It is very powerful to just put your ideas into code and see how quickly projects take shape. The speed is not too bad either(though I have not compared to other languages, I haven't found a problem).