[sdiy] OT: Mathcad users?

[Thomas Strathmann]

On 16.09.13 04:34, Dan Snazelle wrote:
> Ive been noticing matlab code in more and more books on digital audio

That depends on your goals. Every time I have had the "pleasure" of
working with Matlab I was glad when whatever I was doing was finished
and I could go back to other things. For someone who's used to
programming and mathematics Matlab seems to be a mess at first and
second glance. Many things feel like hacks. Although the help
functionality is pretty good (especially if you know what you want to do
but don't know how to tell Matlab in its arcane syntax).

I have used code from books (sometimes with slight changes to accomodate
for incompatibilities) in sciLab for instance. But not unlike Olivier
I'd rather use a tool whose interface resembles a decent enough
programming language so that I do not have to twist my brain too much.

> Does it also work as a self-teaching tool? Mathmatica seems like it might be good for exploring/learning math

How about Maxima? It's a free computer algebra system with a GUI that
supports a notebook-like style of combining equations, calculuations,
and plots. I've used it to put together a notebook of non-linear
transfer functions as a reference for when I might need a specific one.
Very handy. Maybe not so much for exploring because all these tools
pretty much assume that the user knows what he wants, maybe just not how
to do it with a given program. I found Maxima's help/examples feature to
be sufficient for my uses so far. It reminds me of Matlab in a way.

	Thomas