Why matlab
From FinMath
Fair question. In fact there is nothing preventing the use of other languages here but Matlab is predominant and to a large extent the language of choice here, for now, for several reasons:
- Popularity in industry and academia
- Brevity of syntax
- Numerical performance
- Visualization capabilities
- Portability
- Interpretability
- Commercial support
The first listed reason is the most important and needless to say, the personal preference of site creator also played a part. By adopting a high level language we avoid a myriad of issues, most notably:
- Compilation
- Choice of third party libraries
- Design arguments
In large part, novel algorithms, models, prototypes and ideas can be expressed effectively in high level languages and if need be, subsequently rewritten.
[edit] Disadvantages
Having said that, it would be more in keeping with the spirit of the site to use R, or even sage or some other array programming languages.
Disadvantages of Matlab include
- Vendor lock in
- Lack of variable scoping
- Loss of flexibility and performance on certain problems (specialized PDE solvers, lattice problems and complex financial securities).
- Lacking some object oriented (and functional) programming facilities present in other languages.
See also Matlab limitations (wikipedia)
