Back when I was a struggling graduate student working 3 university jobs to stay afloat, one of the job was to build a multi-center data collection system that take cares of remote data upload,\u00a0store it in a database and visualize the waveforms and records.<\/p>\n
I surveyed\u00a0other platforms and languages for a couple of months and finally settled on MATLAB because at the time MATLAB had the most convenient data types (cells), data loading\/saving (‘.mat’ files so I don’t have to manage the datatypes\/format), external interfaces, and most importantly MATLAB FileExchange (FEX) pretty much cover every generic idea\u00a0I can think of. With MATLAB, my work is pretty much down to\u00a0coding the high level ‘business’ logic.<\/p>\n
And no, I wasn’t biased towards MATLAB at the time because I have a signal processing background. I didn’t know much about MATLAB’s programming support back then other than\u00a0number crunching (just like the 90% of the public who misundestood the power of the language), so I wouldn’t choose it for a software project at that level of complexity without much research.<\/p>\n
Learning the\u00a0guts of MATLAB, architecturing and coding\u00a0the entire system took me only 3 months (well, it included a 1 month non-stop 16 hours a day, 7-days a week shut-in programming). Not a shabby platform for a project that is supposed to take 4 years. In fact, the rest of the time was spent<\/p>\n
The rest that has to do with MATLAB was relatively easy once I learned the main ideas through their documentation, newsgroups, Loren’s blog<\/a> and the official support.<\/p>\n To understand and appreciate the beauty of MATLAB and use it effectively, you have to get past the following hurdles:<\/p>\n or else you are coding it like a C programmer: a complete waste of\u00a0MATLAB’s license fees. If you know these 5 aspects of MATLAB well and would say\u00a0there are strictly<\/span> superior options out there, please let me know in the comments section and I’ll look into it.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n\n