I started university today, I’m on a more general IT department. In first semester we have only one subject that is actually IT (rest is maths and english) that is about basic programming in C. And it turns out that university computers that we will use for this subject are all running Ubuntu. I planned to bring my laptop anyway because I want to have my configs, but it’s still great that students who never used Linux will be introduced to it (for some basic stuff tho).
I studied ecology, and first semester maths was done by a professor who only accepted our homework if it was coded in GNU Octave.
That was a fun learning experience for most of us who went into it with no computer background.
His (as it later turned out, correct) reasoning was that Matlab is a standard tool in Geosciences, but he didn’t want to require us to buy it, so we’re using the free alternative that can be installed on any Linux system.
It was my first Linux experience, and I got hooked. In my bachelor’s thesis I coded a 3D simulation of groundwater movement, and afterwards I ended up in IT instead of ecology.
Octave FTW. Matlab is such a corporate cesspool
We used Matlab in 3rd year of high school. Teachers sent us link to download pirated version. I installed GNU Octave.
My uni provided a complete license for the entire MATLAB suite, but this piece of software is genuinely a nightmare to use. Every time i has to touch it, i wish i just had python instead
My uni also provided MATLAB, but I just used Octave instead for all assignments that required it and was never asked about it or told I couldn’t.