fuck you, MATLAB.

Biological Engineering students do psets with MATLAB. It ends badly.

[shitmatlabdoes]

Hi, this isn't a question but I just want to say thank you for creating this. Matlab is such an flaming piece of shit I hate it with my whole heart. Reading this gives me on-the-fly therapy while my soul is bleeding over my Matlab assignments that could be better done in literally any other language. It is so infuriating I want to throw a pee-filled balloon at Mathworks for every minute I spend using this sorry sack of chaos. Why is it the way that it is I'm so pissed

mood

(one of the OG mods here, if it makes you feel any better it's been way too many years since we were going through it and as far as I know all of us still agree with you)

[shitmatlabdoes]

(fall semester’s over so this is probably fine to post now)

OG mod squad here, we’re long gone but it sounds like the class is still the same.  Our condolences.

[gender-trash]

unfriendly reminder that this is a matlab hateblog

1) the syntax is extremely stupid

2) whines about EVERYTHING.  unused variable?? fuck you.  red underline, which looks exactly the same as if you made a syntax error.

3) bad error messages. gib me the line number you rat bastard

4) CAN’T INDEX INTO TEMPORARY ARRAY

5) 1-indexing instead of 0-indexing, because fuck you that’s why

6) indexing syntax is parens instead of square brackets

WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS TO ME.  WHY WOULD YOU MAKE ME WRITE THIS.  i simply wish to plot all 4 of my system’s poles over a range of values, and the poles are returned as a vector, but since i ~~~can’t index into a temporary function~~~ i have to pull THIS stupid bullshit.  truly i live in hell

[gender-trash]

also!!!! why do i need to use parens to index into a vector!! i’m not CALLING him, am i??!

[gender-trash]

possible answer to this mystery, c/o my dad:

[shieldfoss]

2) whines about EVERYTHING. unused variable?? fuck you. red underline, which looks exactly the same as if you made a syntax error.

:3

Also I don’t know what languages you’re used to, but unless it’s C you are definitely calling the vector. E.g. in C++, doing [i] on a std::vector is a function call.

(MATLAB was my first language and I love it still despite all its incredibly weird bullshit)

[gender-trash]

im aware that square bracket indexing requires some kind of function call for anything more complex than a c-style array, but i generally don’t have to think about the implementation — if i see a square bracket i know what the underlying function is going to do. writing abc(i) makes it look like you are *calling a function named abc* which is different from [calling a function to] index into abc — the latter immediately tells me what the underlying function does, and the former is like, well, hopefully it has a more descriptive name than abc so i can take a guess, but i’m still going to have to find out somehow what exactly it does.

(edit: turns out nostalgebraist said it better than me in the replies)

like now that i KNOW about it, it’s fine for writing the kinds of dinky homework scripts i’m writing (although i think it’d be confusing in a big codebase), but mostly i complained about it because i don’t like it & think it looks bad

[shitmatlabdoes]

CompEng grad here, fuck matlab. fuck matlab. fuck matlab. Q: How can you do same thing Python (WHICH IS ALSO A INTERPRETED LANG) does ten times slow? A: MATLAB

Yeah pretty much.

[shitmatlabdoes]

I can't move forward in my lab because MATLAB refuses to acknowledge that 5 is equal to 5.....

[shitmatlabdoes]

input parser's 'partialMatching' is on by default...

… if you pass a variable ’t’ it will silently accept it as the variable ‘this_is_a_horrible_thing_to_do_silently’.

I could imagine this behavior would be preferred by some, I would rather it be explicit than convenient … but to turn it on by default?  oy…

[shitmatlabdoes]

Literally all I did was try to install Matlab on a Win7 machine. Now I'm having to roll back to fucking January

[shitmatlabdoes]

Put in a nonsense variable so I could check and see where this loop was getting stuck. The loop no longer gets stuck.

[shitmatlabdoes]

FUCK

[shitmatlabdoes]

Compilers? Why would you ever need those???

[shitmatlabdoes]

I want a help in writing a matlab program

Write a program that reads the departure time of a train and the arrival time and

computes and displays the trip time. (for Departure time 10:50 and Arrival time

12:20 the trip time will be 1 hr and 30 min)

[shitmatlabdoes]

Write a program that reads the departure time of a train and the arrival time andcomputes and displays the trip time. (for Departure time 10:50 and Arrival time12:20 the trip time will be 1 hr and 30 min)

Sorry, but you seem to have misunderstood the purpose of this blog.  We don’t really take coding challenges/requests.

[shitmatlabdoes]

I don't know what I expected.

[shitmatlabdoes]

Updates from grad school: and then I was a TA.  This was supposed to be a sine wave.  It is not a sine wave.  (Resolution: sample rate fuckery and scaling all the values by a value obtained through trial and error)

Whatever face I made when I saw this on their screens, it was enough to scare the undergrads.

[shitmatlabdoes]

Laplacian Pyramids

I'm not sure how it happened, but somehow Matlab has managed to create a compression technique in which the high-frequency elements are more important than the low-frequency ones.

[shitmatlabdoes]

Update from grad school: if you thought graduating meant we were safe, you thought wrong.

[shitmatlabdoes]

Yes matlab, that is exactly what I wanted you to do. /s

Honestly, the surprizing thing here should be that matlab had the courtesy to round the numbers as it silently casted them to uint8-- given the other tomfoolery going on here I'm amazed that it didn't just decide to truncate out the bits that didn't fit.