/cas/ - Computer Algebra System General

I've played with MATLAB and Mathematica, but really want to get into Sage. (Open source is just sexy.)

>>8773840
I really want to find one CAS that works well and just bite the pillow and become really comfortable with it.

I think sympy might be the best option, not sure.

depends on your major
if engineering then matlab coding will be required for most of your courses
on the job you will need to be good at a regular language and one of the 3m programs


math/physics people will go with maple or mathematica
i can do everything with maple and prefer the way it type sets papers
also matlab if more for numerics while the others are for decimal computing
but you can use any of them to accomplish any task
even if something is easier in matlab (sparse matrix) i will still use maple

more similar to matlab are scilab and octave

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Sage has a lot of niche packages thanks to its large community and open source nature but I think if I was going to be stranded on a deserted island I'd take Mathematica. It may have a lot of meme stuff but it seems like the most well-rounded and easy to use language/front-end combo.

>>8773891
I feel like the pros of mathematica aren't worth learning a new proprietary language. However, it does have great documentation.

>>8773837
matlab master race here.

Played around with wxMaxima for a brief while, but turned out I didn't really have a use for it.

For most stuff i use Mathcad, but for more complex stuff i use Maple. I've tried Matlab and Mathematica, but i think Maple is easier to use.

>>8773837
i use maxima the most. i usually do only algebraic manipulations and light series/integrals so i dont need something extremely powerful

>>8773837
Python's quite powerful, while its harder to learn it has great GUI support and can be made to work with basically any interface.

Matlab is pretty useful for quick calculations, you can type in a couple of variables or an equation and have a graph up in like 30 seconds or less, but if you want to make a full program it's pretty unintuative.

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>>8773969
I had to learn it for school and since then it has shown itself to be the fastest way to accomplish an ends most of the time, though why is a little hard to explain.

Sure it has a bunch of powerful functions built-in but more than that it has the programming model to support these functions. It's like the language creators were trying to find the simplest and most general set of algorithmic primitives and the best glue to stick them together and this is what they came up with.

For example take pic related. The goal was to write a program which took a list of integers as input and returned a list where after each multiple of 10 said multiple replaced the original elements until it reached the next multiple of 10. The main algorithmic primitive being used here is SequencePosition which basically just takes a list and a pattern, and gives you the bookend positions in the list where the pattern occurs. Powerful and very general but you'd still have a tough time writing the program as concisely in a different language because it doesn't have all of this other glue in the form of patterns and very deft routines for list manipulations (@@@) to make it all work.

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On top of that it has really nice graphics capabilities.

/shill

>>8773855
Sympy is complete shit honestly. It really shows that not everything can be fit neatly into python syntax. It's extremely inconvenient, ugly and impotent. If you want to learn a CAS, go for something a little bit more established. Also, "learning" a CAS is absolutely nothing that requires more time than an afternoon or something. You usually use it very ad hoc, and simply google everything you may want to do.

Anyway, if you want open source, go for sage. If you want something pretty and more elaborate, go for Mathematica.

>>8774148
>I don't know what a CAS is

any tips on how to efficiently learn Matlab from zero?

>>8774429
pdf of stormy attaway book and youtube

>>8774198
What I mean by learning is the syntax becoming second nature. Learning by repitition over time.

>>8773837

I'm trying to make one right now