Hi all,
Was curious as to whether anyone here has first hand experience with programming languages in the engineering field. My computer applications in engineering class focuses on MATLAB and C languages, but a lot of what I read says that many engineering jobs use python instead, if anything. Any insight into what programming proficiency is required in engineering is appreciated.
Thanks,
LP

I used Matlab a whole lot in school, once wrote a ~400 line code to optimize the composite layup structure of an airplane wing...

Haven't touched it since graduation, still have my disc at home... Does it still answer "why"?

Dunno We get to Matlab later in the semester

Try it sometime.  Because the angry hampster asked the brave engineer to do it.

A lot depends on what type of engineering and what level of technology.

After 35+ years f bleeding edge electrical engineering (EW, SIGINT, etc.) in the extremely black world we deploy plenty of C code and used MATLAB to develope and design it.

There are even paths in MATLAB that will allow you to export 'C' that implements the exact MATLAB program you have created.

It was not nearly as efficient as carefully developed assembly code but allowed us to reduce design cycle time significantly.

Want to frequency hope many thousand of times a second?
When done correctly you cannot even see the signal is present.

Want to capture an opponents system that is moving thousands of times a second?

We use MATLAB every day.

Matlab is great for science and engineering and it can interface with nearly all types of external data and software either natively or by leveraging functions off the FileExchange user community (which are free use files) - and Mathworks has done a great job infiltrating colleges and making Matlab a std computing language.

The main drawback of Matlab is maintenance of license agreements which can be very expensive for companies with large user bases. C based languages can be implemented using free software or the same platform used by software engineers and Python is free period. If you're looking to work on your own problems, I would suggest one of the Python variants or one of the free Matlab knockoffs.

I converted my departments std fluid mechanics and heat transfer functions from Excel to Matlab (many of the Excel functions were actually copy & pasted from Fortran) and wrote a scalable engine cycle analysis tool using structured data and gridded interpolants of test data; I can run about 1500 points per second.

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Do not get rid of the Excel version.

It actually has a better chance of working lng term than MATLAB.

I have had to spend huge amounts on contracts to 'fix' programs after MATLAB 'updates.'

Far worse than Excel.

Excel code written by people with some idea of what they're doing is one thing, but code written by people who don't know how to turn off screen updating and hop from VBA and the worksheet is just the worst. The code they didn't touch was literally Fortran, GoTo statements and all. Plus the update to Excel 2013 broke most of our VBA's and macros.

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We actually had an isolated cinputer that runs Excell 2003.

Way to much money tied up in the model of the earths particle radiation environment.

Far better than anything published or that NASA has.

Proprietary is a wonderful thing.

I just sanded the coating off a disk a few weeks ago.

We hit a proton sensitivity three times within a couple weeks with a two year rate.
Six years and still counting.

1st hit dead on.
2nd hit 2 weeks early.
3rd hit 2 weeks late.
Waiting on the 4th now.

This right here. I use Matlab literally every single day.

I work with all the bigboy defense firms (Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed, etc etc) and they all use it. All of the National Research labs use it as well.  I also interface with hundreds of non-.mil specific engineering/manufacturing companies across the US while working Bigboy or Lab projects, only a small handful don't use it. In those cases its because they are running some proprietary program specific for their needs (which, of course would have been coded in C).  

It doesn't matter the area; Aero, ME, EE, Physics - You'll be able to do it or simulate it using a combination of Matlab and C. If needed, you can port after the fact to machine code once you've got everything all sussed out in Matlab 1st. I've used matlab for everything from direct hardware manipulation, to full 6 dof simulation, to realtime signal acquisition and ... doing things to it... lol , to complex control loops, to real time pattern recognition, to you name it.


So to OP - ABSOLUTELY learn Matlab. It's essentially just an awesome C IDE with fucktons of #includes and focused on array manipulation.  If you learn one, you're defacto learning the other.  Also, STFU autists, that description of Matlab/C is close enough.

As to python... I have seen very few folks using it. It's claim to fame - fast parsing and OpenCV... IMHO Matlab does it better and faster. I've only ever seen it used in very specific embedded environments.


If you're a Civil or Systems engineer... you wont need to learn any of this. Hell, you can probably drop all math classes after Algebra too.

ME, here. I've used it once at work to filter reflections associated with capturing a microwave signal. However, I do regularly use VBA in Excel to code macros, and learning Matlab certainly helped with writing computer code (although I admit, my coding ability is rudimentary at best).

It is all just tools for your professional toolbox down the road.  Learn everything you can and store it away.  You may not see a use for it now, but there may be a project you will use it or something similar on.  We had to learn to program Matlab, Flex PDE, and C++.  For CAD we used AutoCAD and Solidworks.  We used ALGOR which is now Autodesk Simulation at my last job for FEA.    

LOL on the CE forgetting all math after algebra.  I had a professor who used to poke fun of CE all the time.  I was Metallurgy/Materials Science.  He said we dealt in angstroms and nm, ME in inches and cm, and CE in yards and meters.  He said anything smaller than that the CE could not wrap their mind around.

Good luck in your studies!

IDHunt

I'm an ME.  I use Matlab all the time, mostly for processing large amounts of data; the ability to handle large matrices, etc is very useful.  When you have several million data points excel doesn't cut it.  Matlab is great and has a good statistics toolbox.  It's also nice to be able to run models in simulink and compare to experimental results.  I'm a matlab fanboi, and I probably use 0.1% of its capability.  I think it really depends on your workload and field, though.  If you plan to do anything with designing experiments and collecting large amounts of data, it's a fantastic tool for processing and manipulating what you get.  It also has great modeling capability in simulink for most systems.  

That being said, I would consider most of my code to be pretty basic.  I don't consider myself a programmer, but I consider Matlab to be an indepensable tool.  I wish I was better at C, mostly for programming microcontrollers in designing experiments, however, Matlab has microcontroller interface tools that I am looking at. I know a lot of people do use python, but I haven't encountered it much.  For any type of data processing, though, it's hard to beat matlab with all of its built-in functionality.

If you want to learn Python, MIT open-courseware has a good class on it with full video lectures and everything... free to download whenever.  So, if you think that is more applicable to your field, you could always work through that.

Mech-E, learned programming using Fortran on a DEC VAX system.   I have used Visual Basic, Matlab, C/C++ and Python I personally like Python with Numpy and Scipy libraries added in.   Captures most of what I used Matlab for.  Once you are proficient at one language learning additional ones get easier.

great to know that i may have to actually use MATLAB. I hated learning it because most of the time it was with a sub professor because of some health problems witj my actual professor. I know i need to practice it alot more. How was your C/C++ class? I start mine on the 9th. I have always wondered how much of this i was going to use as i am trying to be a mechanical and structural civil engineer.

I'm an R&D engineer in the defense sector. I'm 24. I use MATLAB almost exclusively. My work is with ISR systems simulations and design.

It really depends on what in engineering you're doing.  Unless you want to be a software engineer I'd probably go with matlab.  

Then again, the most programming I've done since graduation has been an interpolation macro (excel) and an automatic graph function for a common data file (again, excel).

I liked matlab though.  Never could get my head around C or any of its variants.

C is cheap.

I am negotiating a Matlab license and it has only gone WAY up.

Upside of $5,000 for one year.

I will spend 6 months getting older programs to operate on the new version of Matlab.

And THEN I might have some billable hours.

I work as a mathematician in another industry, but if my experience is any guide, you can never know too many programming languages.

Forgot to add, I basically live in MATLAB. But I don't work in engineering, so YMMV.