Audio in python

[user 37518]

I never touched FORTRAN after about 1986. Even in the 80s and 90s the science guys complained about fundamental numerical problems with C. Not sure of that still holds or whether Python is better. Most of what I've done is integer and non-demanding floating point numerical stuff.

I have had to use MATLAB before. While it works well for some things, it is horribly inefficient. One job I started out inheriting a mess of a computer vision algorithm that had also been implemented in MATLAB (for a multi-million dollar piece of production capital equipment). What a disaster. After a year I was finally able to convince management that both the algorithm and its implementation language were terrible choices. Redesigned it and implemented in C/C++ for a 10-30x speedup.

For one-off heavy lifting scientific computation/modelling stuff it might be a valid choice, but you will pay in time and/or compute resources if it is a big computation. In production, throughput (and cost) are king.

Absolutely, MATLAB is great because it allows you to do a lot of stuff. It has a lot of toolboxes, and the way it handles arrays is amazing, but it is definitely very inefficient.

 

[rmburrow]

the version of fortran (IV) I learned on in the 60s, was pretty rudimentary...

I recall with some amusement how crude their math operations were. I recall rounding errors like 2x3=5.99 and silly stuff like that.

JR

VAX FORTRAN was the best. Intel Visual FORTRAN sort of emulates VAX FORTRAN on PC's. I bought it but couldn't load it so I use an earlier version of Compaq Visual FORTRAN. I use the FORTRAN 77 constructs....good for solving custom engineering applications. You need an XP machine to run Compaq Visual FORTRAN. I believe there is a version of Intel Visual FORTRAN for Win 10 out there but it is pricey and MS Developer Studio is required. I am ready to dump Windows and go LINUX.