MATLAB for Python programmers

Question

I've used MATLAB on and off before, but I need to develop a good understanding of it now, and the language I'm most familiar with is Python. Care to describe a MATLAB language feature, idiom, best practice or philosophy as compared to Python?

There's a terrific amount of buzz for and resources pertaining to going the opposite direction, the MATLAB to (Python + tools) conversion, but that's not the way I need to go. Which data structures should I swap in, should I use classes, where might NumPy intuition go wrong, etc.?

Answer 1

The documentation is one of the strong points of MATLAB. If you need to get into MATLAB, one of the best places to start is the "Getting Started" section. Some of it will be too basic for you, which is a lot better than if it was too advanced, but it will show you the most important aspects of the language.

One of the things you may watch out for is that MATLAB starts indexing at 1. For other aspects of MATLAB programmers may need to be aware of, you may have a look at the answers to this question.

If you need MATLAB for a specific task, the help provides lots of demos that should put you on the right path.