# Mathcad, MATLAB, Maple & Mathematica

1. ### Entropia

142

Which one do you use, and why?

211

12. ### graphic7

560
It's also from my experience that Mathematica doesn't have standard syntax. Often when loading an external package, such as Graphics`, you'll find that it's rather difficult to plot vectors compared to plotting vector fields because of the syntax issues.

Another Mathematica gripe is the way it treats matrices. Matrices are treated as lists, and in order to get a list to look like a matrix you must add an annoying "MatrixForm."

13. ### cantormath

5
matlab is the industry standard. Maple is what engineers and physic individuals use, cause its easier. then when they get to gradschool, they got to use something stronger. I dont know a single person who uses mathcad, I dont even know if it really exist. Mathematica is simply and faster then matlab when you are doing simply things. Programing is like C.

14. ### PerennialII

1,102
I can see people feeling mathematica to be a bit complex syntax wise ... probably its greatest weakness is to get started. Of these 4 I've used Maple the least primarily because Mathematica does all that it does, and I've found it to be numerically a bit more efficient in my appls. Mathcad IMO is an extended scientific calculator ... the other 3 are meant for real scientific stuff and in such respect superior, but in simpler cases can be overly complex. I prefer Matlab in numerical number crunching tasks over Mathematica, but everything else I do pretty much with Mathematica.

15. ### imabug

345
There's a very good article in the January/February issue of Computing in Science and Engineering that looks at the origins and target users of Matlab, Maple and Mathematica. I imagine most university libraries ought to have a subscription to it. The issue isn't online just yet though.

I've used Mathematica and Octave (Matlab clone) and each has their strength and weaknesses and is geared toward a particular type of user and application.

I think Mathematica tends to be better at doing symbolic things, which Matlab doesn't do. But Matlab does do matrix things extremely well. Deciding which one is better will depend on what you want to do with it.

16. ### scasey1960

2
I've got a question about extracting a subset of an array within Mathcad. For instance, I've got two arrays - X, Y. I want to plot only the portion of Y where X is such that X > x1 and X < x2. How do I do that?

Thanks.

SC

17. ### cbl2681

1
Travelling Sales Person

Does anyone have any websites to recommend on how to start matlab programming for Travelling Sales Person(tsp) problem?

18. ### TSN79

367
I know that Maple can export graphs as .dxf files only if they are 3D, which sucks! Can Mathematica do that also with 2D graphs?

19. ### Neohaven

36
".dxf" are 3D files... why would you want to export a 2D graph into a 3D file?

20. ### TSN79

367
Because .dxf is the only export format that AutoCAD can read...but I don't want a 3D graph, I only need 2D. But I solved this problem long ago, never mind.