Math software?

[Dusty Chalk]

Rather than resurrect a subthread in "what did you do today" or "ye mac thread", I thought I'd start a new one.

What is the math software of choice to do DSP, modeling, etc.?  I wouldn't mind paying a little bit, but of course I would prefer free, since I'm only a hobbyist at this point.  I actually do need it at work (not really, my assessment), but CSC is so cheap they won't spring for anything the customer doesn't put in the contract as 'required'.

Shelly posted that she hated the way Mathematica does licensing, and after investigating it, I concur that my infrequent use of it will not justify paying $155/year or $20/month.  I might actually be in the Matlab beta program (I still get an email every time a new beta release comes out).

Sounds like this reddit thread, except I'm asking youse guys (Chris, KG, Shelly, Birgir, et al)...I'll try Octave in lieu of any other recommendations or disrecommendations.  Any and all thoughts appreciated.

[luvdunhill]

I use Octave.

- the et. al.

[morphsci]

I do not use it for any DSP, but R does have signal processing packages available. And it is free and multi-platform.

Edit: I love this topic. Subscribed.

Edited January 4, 2017 by morphsci

[dsavitsk]

I don't use it myself, so I cannot offer any comparison, but anytime Matlab and R are mentioned, it is always worth including scipy in the conversation: https://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy-0.18.1/reference/tutorial/signal.html

 

[Dreadhead]

Dusty I vote SciPy or Octave. I have used Octave for DSP work myself though I use Matlab at work. A bunch of people also use SciPy and I will be learning more Python in the near future due to necessity.

I tried to get used to R but I found the data structures clunky and it didn't really seem setup from the get go for scripting. That said I was not trained and was just trying to get a particular thing going and once completed I abandoned it.

[shellylh]

I use Sage. Open source, free, don't know if it does what you want.

http://www.sagemath.org/

Edited January 11, 2017 by shellylh

[swt61]

I like Sage and just a hint of Tarragon.

[Dusty Chalk]

I'm more of a Oregano, Parsley, Dill Weed, Carraway, ...oh, who am I kidding, I like all the spices.  Except maybe anise, and even that in certain recipes, if used lightly.  I'm sure there are others.  And maybe allspice, which is a weird name, and shouldn't be called that.

Thanks Shelly, I'll definitely check Sage out and see.  I do have some unmentioned requirements, so don't really expect anyone else to have a solid recommendation.  I'm trying to figure out a good model for what I'm trying to do.  It's sort of a sparse matrix meets...I don't know...that's why I didn't mention it, the idea isn't fully formed yet.

Thanks everyone for all your input.

[cspirou]

Love Mathematica. If it's too pricey and you don't need to do heavy computation then I would just get a Raspberry Pi 3 for $40. It's free with Raspbian. Otherwise I like using Matlab, but I should really learn how to use Octave.

Edited January 17, 2017 by cspirou

[crappyjones123]

R. Free. Lots of documentation available. You can probably grab previously published code and change it to fit your needs as opposed to writing it from scratch. I hate using square brackets so never liked Mathematica for that reason alone. Also, back when I was required to use it, everything was too yellow...their documentation, logo, splash page etc. Hated that shade of yellow. 

[Dusty Chalk]

Yeah, but impossible to Google easily.

Yellow is the most pleasant text colour.  My favourite terminal that I've ever used was "bisque" -- 0xffe4c4 -- on "DarkForestGreen" -- 0x002d04.  But it's from the perspective of light text on dark background.  I'm not sure what the best choice for dark text on light background is, because that never interested me.

No, seriously, thanks for your input.

[Sherwood]

I don't know shit about math software, but I do like to talk about color palettes.  Have some solarized:

[Voltron]

Aren't you getting hazard pay? Put it to good use if you survive!

[Sherwood]

I've got a piggy bank labelled "MOA V".  What better use could there be?

[Voltron]

True enough. 2017 should be an MOA year...