Norman Sasono

Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly Mathematics – G.H. Hardy
See also: Other Geeks@INDC

About Me

I miss Visual Studio, yes, the IDE

There's an old saying: "You don't know what you have until it's gone.".

No, I don't talk about this, but I am talking about Visual Studio.

For more than half a year now I've been doing more coding in MATLAB and in Mathematica compared to coding in Visual Studio (and C#). In terms of library/built in functions, nothing can beat the comprehensiveness of MATLAB for doing scientific/engineering computing. It has them all, numerical computation, linear algebra, etc up to toolboxes for Fuzzy Logic, Neural Network, Signal Processing, etc. No C# library is (or will ever) close to this. In terms of language, even if with Lambda Expression, there is no way C#/.NET can be compared with Mathematica to do Algebraic Computing or even its higher order functional style.

Yeah, it is not fair to compare the C# (.NET) with MATLAB and Mathematica as C# (.NET) is a general purpose language/library, while MATLAB & Mathematica were by design made to do scientific/engineering/mathematics computing.

But, in terms of IDE, I can say MATLAB sucks big time! Smile The m-file editor of MATLAB (IDE) just so "old fashioned" compared to the sophisticated-sate-of-the-art IDE like Visual Studio. I've never used Wolfram Workbench to do Mathematica programming (I just use the standard editor within Mathematica IDE), but I feel Visual Studio is still a more superior IDE.

Not just the IDE, the MATLAB has another limitation that I hate. All functions there are global! There's no sense of packaging or namespace. If you've been doing Component Oriented and Object Oriented stuff you will look at MATLAB with strange look, "everything is global?". Well, they say the newer MATLAB has OO capability, but I haven't look into that.

But, again, what I really miss is the VS IDE. When coding in MATLAB or in Mathematica, I do miss things I took for granted in Visual Studio like Intellisense, Debugging Tool, and other IDE features. In VS, when I type a function name, the IDE will autocomplete the function name, will show the parameter list and the overloads as well as the description and the types of the arguments and the return value. In MATLAB, I feel like I'm blind. You have to memorize all these stuff.

Man, I do miss my Visual Studio IDE. Smile.

O, I don't mean I don't code in C#/Visual Studio anymore. I still do. But when I code in MATLAB and Mathematica I wish they have as cool as VS Intellisense & Debugging capabilities. Now I appreciate VS IDE more! Intellisense does ease your life.

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Comments

I miss Visual Studio, yes, the IDE | How-to Build Your Own Home Studio said:

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# April 21, 2008 8:54 PM

reyza said:

walau matlab 'sangat terbatas' dibandingkan VS (walau memang tidak fair membandingkan mereka berdua), tetapi matlab lah yang membuat perhitungan untuk prediksi konsentrasi zat CO berhasil saya selesaikan dan akhirnya bisa melepaskan diri dari status mahasiswa.

aah...i love matlab :)

# April 21, 2008 10:39 PM

yulian said:

Yeah...i remember my final project title "Aplikasi Metoda Least Square Dalam Estimasi Kedalaman Profil Sumber Anomali Gaya Berat Residual Daerah Bandung"...Semua rumus integral, matrix, statistik, gauss newton, fourier, saya solve semua pake Matlab...ga kebayang klo ga pake Matlab, ga kan lulus2 keknya itu kuliah :)...it help me a lot!

# April 22, 2008 8:33 AM

norman said:

He..he.. iya, tanpa MATLAB saya juga mungkin bisa lebih lama lagi di S1 dulu. Tapi ya itu, udah kebiasaan di manja sama Intellisense, comprehensive resource/doc di MSDN, debugging tool, refactoring, etc yg ada di Visual Studio. Saya jd sering gemes kalau coding di MATLAB. Berasa kok kuno amat sih ni editor.

Memang, menangnya MATLAB spt yg saya bilang. m-file library-nya sangar! Tp utk urusan IDE & manjain developer, VS & MSDN tetap rajanya!

# April 22, 2008 10:25 AM

Pages tagged "wolfram" said:

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# April 23, 2008 10:46 AM

ronald said:

kalo gua rindu Eclipse dan netbeans..

he3x terakhir pake pas TA

# April 23, 2008 10:06 PM

yulian said:

@ronald

netbeans?? wah IDE yang berat tuh jalannya :D, inget waktu ngoding J2ME :)

# April 24, 2008 7:32 AM

norman said:

:)

Saya pernah pakai Eclipse. Didn't miss it at all. He..he..he..

# April 27, 2008 8:39 PM

andriyadi said:

Pakai Matlab cuman buat nyelesaian persamaan waktu praktikum, kalo gak salah praktikum ttg Fisika Zat Padat.

Anyway, why you don't you use VS to use Mathlab library. Is that even possible? I don't know :) I'm not intend to try that :P Kalo emang bisa, bisa jadi topik MSDN day tuh :)

Good luck with the Matlab.

# May 3, 2008 6:44 PM

eriawan said:

Mas Norman,

If all functions are global, what about the use of variables, states? Are they global too?

AFAIK, all global variables and states, especially those with mutable states, are considered as introducing side effects, contradict the fact that functional constructs in functional programming especially the "pure" ones, don't permit side effects. And it's not meant to be composable.

CMIIW, mas Norman. :)

# May 9, 2008 2:36 PM

norman said:

Eriawan,

One that has all functions as global is MATLAB. MATLAB is not functional language. It is imperative language. Yes, indeed it is ugly. MATLAB's strength is that it already has a very rich library (toolboxes).

It is Mathematica that is a functional language.

# May 12, 2008 11:32 AM
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