Why isn’t Mathematica not as popular as MATLAB or Python? [closed] - dnf

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I found it much better on visualisation but not many people using it. Why isn't mathematica not as popular as matlab or python?

MATLAB and Mathematica are different packages for different user groups. Both software tools have similar freeware versions including Octave (MATLAB), Maxima (Mathematica), and others.
MATLAB has realized its objectives as being a software package for prototyping, idea testing, and simulations. It is more popular with engineers and some scientists. This popularity is based, in part, on marketing to students and instructors, ease of use, and availability.
Mathematica is a difficult and yet powerful tool. It has a set of language options and the usage has been personally frustrating. I was excited about integration with R language, but I have found that integration to be lacking, so far. It is more popular with a few engineers, some scientists, and mathematicians. Mathematica's latest editions have desirable licensing for students and home users. While not free, expense is reasonable.
Both tools have limited use in some industries.
Licensing is much more expensive for industrial partners. Industry continues to tighten its belt. Therefore, if you plan to be in industry, it may be highly beneficial to experience the freeware options, which nowadays includes the packages mentioned above as well as R, Python, and others.

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Master thesis on developping Twincat3 driver [closed]

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If there is any PLC programmer or Twincat3 user out there. I would like to write my master thesis on Twincat3 in a company. Basically, They have different kinds of the Test bench, and they want someone to develop drivers for them. I have no experience with PLC or C++ or IEC61131 languages. Is it possible to learn any of these in 3 months, and then start writing the thesis? I have three months of Internship time before starting. I am having a bit of doubt. Even though it is daunting as an Electrical engineering student, I have no other options.
I thank you in Advance.
Also, The test benches are mainly Powerelectronics or Electrical machine test bench. I believe I need to automate the test processes in twincat3.
Best Regards
Good choice with TwinCAT 3. TwinCAT 3 is very capable, and quite easy to learn (of course dependent on your background, but generally a good platform to work on).
All I can support you with is a link to a TwinCAT 3 tutorial that I've created that is free of charge (available on YouTube):
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLimaF0nZKYHz3I3kFP4myaAYjmYk1SowO
There are also some other resources available both on YouTube and on the website. I've created a set of links here to help you find all the resources you might need.
To answer your question I would say it depends. Three months is not much time, especially considering you probably have a lot of other things that need to go in there (doing studies, writing the thesis, implementation, conclusions etc). It depends on the complexity of your project (it's not very specific what "writing drivers for them" means). If it's a simple project (including a very basic set of I/Os) it might be do-able. If it's anything more complex (like needing to add a front-end, doing motion control and maybe even safety) then it's most likely going to be hard to finish it in three months.
But again, I think more details on what you want to achieve is necessary.

Is MatLab worth buying? [closed]

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I can access MatLab on school computers, but it would be more like a convenience factor as of right now. I want to get into programming using raspberry pi later on, but is it worth buying in the meantime? Will it be useful to me as a computer engineer? Thanks.
I have used Matlab as a student and employee for over 10 years now. I have recently taken an interest in Python as a free open-source alternative to Matlab and have been extremely impressed. Matlab is a very powerful and convenient tool, but has a significant cost, especially if toolboxes are needed. Python seems to cover all the same capability needs that I have in Matlab (with toolboxes), and if I ever need help doing something in python that I know how to do in matlab, I just do a quick google search and 9 times out of 10 I end up on this website, taking advantage of the questions that others have already answered.
With your question on Raspberry pi, it can actually run python code on board, but not the case for matlab.
I am not a computer engineer, but am of the opinion that python would likely benefit you more than matlab in the end as it is free, more widely used and can be used on devices such as raspberry pi. For reference, I have degrees in physics and electrical engineering and spend a great deal of time at work building optical sensors, operating them, and processing their data.
One more note: I like the Anaconda distribution of python, highly recommended

Scala usage statistics [closed]

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We are a small team of developers and are currently in the process of drafting a business idea targeting scala developers as potential customers. In order to convince investors we obviously need some numbers on usage, some of which we were unable to find:
While there is a list of companies listed at typesafe.com we were not able to find out what they actually do with Scala and what the total market share of Scala is.
The TIOBE Index lists scala as the 29th most popular (?) language but the methods seem questionable and it seems hard to find out what that means for the real world. Are there any surveys where developers were actually asked what they use, which involve less guessing? (Possibly even in a commercial context)
For us it would be great to be able to print some (preferably exponential) curves on the development of Scala usage in the last years. While that is how we feel that scala is spreading we dont have anything to proove it.
Is there any evidence on scala beeing popular in the financial sector or other specific areas? For example, there seems to be some kind of a "Scala hotspot" in the financial district of London and it would be great to proove that.
Any hints on citeable surveys and studies would be awesome!
this won't tell you how many people are using it, but is a good indicator of trending technologies, as oposed to TIOBE, which rates any tech invented since the wheel
RedMonk uses github + stackoverflow
Scala is indeed popular in Finance in London. We are using it for our projects in a Front Office department in a major investment bank.

Undergraduate project related to High Performance Computing or similar fields [closed]

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I am looking for ideas for my undergraduate project and I quite like the area of High Performance Computing , has got a lot of scope for research . Are there any ideas / already existing open source projects worth looking at ?
One hot field right now is in the area of algorithmic trading. You can sign up for $3000 (if you're under 21 -- it's $10k for over 21) at InteractiveBrokers.com and they will give you a free paper trading account (which is fake money traded using realtime data) of $10,000,000. They have API's in C#, C++, VB, Java and reasonable support... You could write your own stock pair trading algorithm. They have good documentation on how to get started.
You can scale this as high as you want, also a lot of people do high frequency trading which requires hpc and in-depth knowledge of Unix and C++.
Worth looking into, my 2 cents.
Perhaps massively parallel processing? Libraries like Cuda, OpenCL, and DirectCompute are just blossoming, and have a high likelihood of becoming commonplace. In my company, we are researching uses for OpenCL, and we're finding that it has the potential to revolutionize our industry.
Just a thought.
I would suggest looking at Sandia National Labs's SST (The Structural Simulation Toolkit). Its a highly parallel simulator framework used for HPC. It uses and incorporates other simulators from academia and industry. For instance, it currently integrates GEM5, QSim, MacSim, DRAMSim, Merlin, Portals, DRAMSim2, Iris, etc. Moreover, it is open source so you can contribute to the development.
You could work on integrating other academia components into SST, improve the interface of one of the components with SST, or just improve of the components themselves.

Where can I find some open source implementations of the Boids algorithm, for the iOs? [closed]

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The question says it all: I'm looking for working, open source, implementations of algorithms (or derivatives there of) initially described in the Boids paper.
It looks like most of the code out there was written before "Open Source" really meant anything. I asked Mr Google:
Craig Reynolds's Boids page has a bunch of links for various languages and some mostly-original Lisp. Embedding a Lisp interpreter should not be that hard.
Christopher Kline, C++, Not-For-Profit. Licence terms for commercial apps negotiable with the author.
Tom Bak, Thong Chau, Visual C++/OpenGL/GLUT, no licence. You could try contacting them.
Robert Platt, VC++/D3D, no licence. You could try contacting him too.
You're unlikely to find anything specifically "for the iOS" (or even written in Objective-C), but C and C++ versions should be easy to port. .NET versions should be easy enough to run using MonoTouch.
This might help: Chapter from Killer game programming in Java about Flocking Boids