The native features in MATLAB are often very good most of the time, as I’ve yet to hear anybody spending time to shop for a IDE outside the official one.

Atom has the feel of Maple/MathCAD, and Jupyter Notebook has the feel of Mathematica. Spyder feels like MATLAB the most, but it’s hugely primitive.

IDLE is more miserable than a command prompt. It doesn’t even have the decency to recall command history with up arrow. It’s like freaking DOS before loading doskey.com. Not to mention that single clicking on the window won’t set the cursor to the active command line, which you have to scroll all the way down to click on the bottom line. WTF! I’d rather use the command prompt and give up meaningless syntax coloring.

IPython (in Spyder) is unbearably slow (compare to MATLAB’s editor which I consider slow to the extent that it’s marginally bearable for the interactive features it offers), but at least usable unlike IDLE, and most importantly the output display is pprint (pretty printer) formatted so it’s legible. Just type locals() and see what kind of sh*t Python spits out in IDLE/cmd.exe and you’ll see what I meant.

I simply cannot live without who/whos provided in IPython, but I still don’t like it showing the accessible functions/modules along with the variables (I know, Python doesn’t tell them apart). Nonetheless it’s still weak because these are automagics that doesn’t return the results as Python data (just print). Spyder’s ‘variable explorer’ is the only place I can find that doesn’t include loaded functions/modules. Python should have provided facilities to get the user-introduced variables exclusively and leave the modules to a different function like MATLAB’s import command that shows imported packages/classes.

However, pretty printer doesn’t even come close to MATLAB in terms of the amount of dirty work disp() did to format the text to make it easy to read. Keys in the dictionary shown in pretty printer in Python are not right-aligned like MATLAB struct so we can easily tell keys and values apart. For example:

MATLAB struct shows:
          name: 'S'
          size: [9 1]
         bytes: 7765
         class: 'struct'
        global: 0
        sparse: 0
       complex: 0
       nesting: [1×1 struct]
    persistent: 0

Python with Pretty Printer shows:
{'__name__': '__main__',
 '__doc__': 'Automatically created module for IPython interactive environment',
 '__package__': None,
 '__loader__': None,
 '__spec__': None,
 '__builtin__': <module 'builtins' (built-in)>,
 '__builtins__': <module 'builtins' (built-in)>,
 '_ih': ['', 'locals()'],
 '_oh': {},
 '_dh': ['C:\\Users\\Administrator'],
 'In': ['', 'locals()'],
 'Out': {},
 'get_ipython': <bound method InteractiveShell.get_ipython of <ipykernel.zmqshell.ZMQInteractiveShell object at 0x00000000059B7828>>,
 'exit': <IPython.core.autocall.ZMQExitAutocall at 0x5a3b198>,
 'quit': <IPython.core.autocall.ZMQExitAutocall at 0x5a3b198>,
 '_': '',
 '__': '',
 '___': '',
 '_i': '',
 '_ii': '',
 '_iii': '',
 '_i1': 'locals()'}

I often convert things to MATLAB dataset() because the disp() method is excellent, such as struct2dataset(ver()). table/disp() is nice, but I think they overdid it by defaulting to fancy rich-text that bold the header, which makes it a magnitude of orders slower, and it’s not using the limited visual space effectively to show more data. Python still has a lot more to do in the user-friendly department.

Although I am a big fan of MATLAB, it’s time for me to really try out Python so I can fairly compare the pros and cons of both languages.

The first tiny hurdle for Python is its scattered installation process for Windows. I thought Python(x,y) will give me everything in one place, but turns out the Spyder is stuck in Python 2.7. To install Python 3.7, I’ll need to do it from scratch. Here are the steps:

1. Download official Python 3. You will need that for the “pip” package manager located in {python37}/scripts
2. Update PIP first to avoid complaints. You can run it anywhere in command prompt
   python -m pip install --upgrade pip
   You don’t call PIP to update PIP because you an executable cannot write itself in WindowsNote that for 32-bit Python, you might run into Python37\python.exe: No module named pip, so you might want to use ensurepip to bootstrap: python -m ensurepip
3. Now I’ll need Spyder3, a MATLAB-like IDE. Qt5 is one of the pre-req:
   pip install PyQt5
4. And finally Spyder3
   pip install Spyder
   pip does not install icons in your start menu. So I’ll need to manually create a shortcut
   {Python37}/Scripts/spyder3.exe
   .py files are not associated with Spyder3 (normally it’ll just directly run the python script with python3). I usually manually change the association in Windows to Sypder3.
5. PyVISA is the analog of “Instrument Control Toolbox” in MATLAB.
   pip install pyvisa
   MATLAB’s Instrument Control Toobox also cover serial ports, which is done in Python by PySerial
   pip install PySerial
6. Numpy is included with scipy:
   pip install scipy
7. Turns out that only NumPy and IPython is installed with SciPy, not the entire ecosystem.
   pip install pandas
pip install matplotlib
   If you know the power of dataset/table objects in MATLAB like I do, you’ll jump for dataframes in panadas.
8. SymPy, the analog of MATLAB’s symoblic math toolbox, needs to be installed separately
   pip install sympy
9. IPython gives the ‘notebook’ feel in Mathematica, MathCAD and Maple, where the returned results are directly pasted in the same area where your command/syntax is. I rarely cared for it because I usually want the max visual real estate for my plots.

Update: I tried Anaconda (2019.03, Python 3.7.3 x64) which supposedly have everything in one place, but the Spyder it included crashes right out of the box. Jyupter is confusing as it relies on the web-browser to render the results. Feels patchy and doesn’t look like it adds more than the steps above. Uninstalled it without hesitation.

Update: To update the packages, tack -U switch at the end of each of the above pip install commands. Remember to follow the order of dependencies (e.g. update PyQt5 before Spyder)