Communications of the ACM
The A-Z of Programming Languages: Matlab
"My first MATLAB was very primitive. It was hardly even a programming language," says MATLAB creator Cleve Moler.
Credit: The Three-Mode Company
Cleve Moler, the creator of the MATLAB programming language, says he originally developed the language to solve problems involving computations with matrices and mathematics. "The original intention was that it would be easy to use and that it would have solid mathematics underlying it," he notes. MATLAB has since transitioned into a general purpose programming language.
Moler says MATLAB is used to design everyday products such as hearing aids and automobile electronics and he attributes much of its popularity to its graphics and plotting capabilities. "Whenever I read a scientific or engineering publication or journal article and there's a plot in it I look to see if it's made from MATLAB," he says. "It's [a] sort of puzzle; they don't say if it is a MATLAB plot--they don't need to--but there are clues in the way the axes are labeled and so on that indicates a MATLAB plot."
From Computerworld Australia
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