<p>Which program do you guys use in the industry or the academia/ Which one do you recommend? Thank you.</p>
<p>In the industry, Matlab is much more widely used than other tools.</p>
<p>What are you using it for? Matlab is great for what it is made for… light scientific computing and data processing and math work. Maple and Matematica are slightly different than Matlab in purpose. They are most useful as symbolic math programs. I don’t even know what Mathcad is.</p>
<p>I use Matlab regularly in class. I’ve never seen it used in industry much. At least for ChE, Aspen is used alot.</p>
<p>It isn’t a “vs.” issue. They are all tools with a purpose. We use both Matlab and Mathcad extensively here. I would guess, however, that Matlab is the most commonly employed general processing tool across industry and academia if that’s what you are asking.</p>
<p>Both in school and in industry (as an EE) I have almost entirely seen MATLAB. I know one engineer who stubbornly insisted on EXCEL, and another who used Mathematica, but both of those were exceptions to the rule and caused much consternation among coworkers.</p>
<p>Matlab.</p>
<p>Most of our everyday crunching in structural engineering is done through Excel spreadsheets and macros, since those are easily transportable, but all our really intense stuff is through Matlab.</p>
<p>By the way, you might want to look into Octave, which is basically the opensource (free) version of Matlab. Most m-files run pretty much unaltered.</p>
<p>A good Matlab user can completely obviate the use of Excel for scientific number crunching though. Excel has its uses, but Matlab is a thousand times better at least for scientific use.</p>
<p>Yes, certainly, Matlab runs computational circles around Excel. But if you’re trying to make something that’s going to be more universally understood to the non-power-user in a workplace setting, Excel is just a little more accessible. We’ve got a lot of gray-hairs at our firm who have no idea what an m-file is, but even a minimally-trained chimpanzee could manage to open and hack their way through an Excel file.</p>
<p>I guess as long as I am not sending my files to a blue-hair, I will always prefer Matlab. I can always send them the pretty plots in a powerpoint file or something that I make in either Matlab or Tecplot. No reason to bother with Excel in my opinion except in rare circumstances… for engineers anyway.</p>
<p>Matlab, easily.</p>
<p>I’ve used both. Matlab is by far the easier language to become good at. Mathematica does not even have a debugger. You must use print to debug your code. Mathematica is much more complex to understand once your program starts to get larger than 100 lines. Matlab is simpler, and you can more easily read and understand the code. </p>
<p>Matlab is used much more than Mathematica as well. Unless you are doing alot of symbolic stuff, stick to Matlab. Also, Matlab has an easy to use GUI builder, while Mathematica does not. </p>
<p>In the industry, Matlab is used much more. Go to any job site and search job listings, you will find 100 listings for Matlab skills for each one listing asking for Mathematica.</p>
<p>I’m just curious, since I’ve had fairly limited exposure with matlab, but I’ve been doing data crunching recently where I need to do a bit of parsing of my data files. Data’s spit out of my machine as a .txt file with a bunch of header rows (not consistent) and then goes into tab delimited data with breaks at differing rows from one data point to the next. I then have to go in, do a baseline subtraction, a normalization, get a plot, and then find where to stop a curve fit due to a transition, fit the curve with a polynomial, and then take the derivative of said curve fit.</p>
<p>^ I HATE when that happens!</p>
<p>jk…I have no idea what you guys are talking about, but hear my son complaining about Matlab…</p>
<p>Is MATlab any useful for civil engineers ( particular transportation engineering)
I feel like civil use a lot of excel only. Should I learn MATlab as a civil student?</p>
<p>^scofield1990. ofcourse you should learn a computational tool. Matlab is one of the best. I can’t believe, as an engineer no less, you are even asking the question.</p>
<p>Those who use excel to do engineering calculations are not engineers in my opinion. To be a real engineer, you need to use a real engineering tool.</p>
<p>lol… guess no real engineering was done before the advent of computers then, before they “had the right tools”. wonder how they built things like the golden gate bridge or the eiffel tower</p>
<p>lol, lets us throw away all the computers and go back to using the slide rule, lol.</p>
<p>lol, why even use slide rule, or even a paper and pencil, the pyramids were build without any of this. lol.</p>
<p>lol, just cut wood and break rocks by hand and mix cement with water in any proportion and let us throw it all on top of each other, and hope that it stays up when an earthquake hits, lol</p>
<p>lol, and hope that not many people die when the buildings fall down, lol</p>
<p>didn’t know the trick for determining the correct w/c ratio was to use matlab instead of excel</p>
<p>I have seen quite a few people using MATLAB and others (including myself) using MathCAD. These are two programs that are quite different in thier uses. </p>
<p>MATLAB is more like a programming language and is used in place of one.</p>
<p>I write most of my reports in MathCAD. It is a lousy word processor but more than makes up for it in that all your equations are “live”. Change the data and all the values change. I have made myself a library of standard calculations and just cut and paste those into what I’m working on. It has a steep initial learning curve but once you get past that part I believe it is a great program. </p>
<p>I wouldn’t worry about which to learn while in school. Your first job will dictate which is more usefull to you.</p>