So I have bitten the bullet and am committed to phasing out Matlab completely by 2015. I have Julia installed and can sort of run code in it although I have no idea how to change directories. cd() doesn’t seem to work for me. I have also tried to install matplotlib on my MacBook Pro running OS 10.8 using a SciPy superpack but it does not seem to work yet. When I try to plot something, nothing happens but I have some bouncing rocket ships in my dock. Feel free to let me know what I’m doing wrong.
Addendum: I installed iPython using Pip and I can plot out of iPython
Scientific Clearing House 
Hi Carson
From the Julia prompt you can type a semicolon and the prompt will change from julia> to shell> and you can treat it like a standard unix shell (for one operation). That way you can change directories.
Plotting is easily the hardest part about installing and using Julia. Bard and I have had success using the Anaconda Python package ( http://continuum.io/downloads ) for Mac OSX as opposed to the preinstalled one that comes with OSX. We don’t exactly understand why, Anaconda must come with the necessary interface stuff pre-loaded. I also could not use ‘Julia Studio’, a Julia interface software, but had to use simply Julia-0.30 as a terminal. We also use matplotlib for plotting, but Anaconda might come with that. Let me know if this works.
Brent
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Thanks Brent
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Note to Carson’s addendum, Carson and I were able to get Python to plot using matplotlib in the command line. There were two issues. First SciPy superpack had installed the wrong version for his OS. That was easily fixed by using easy_install of the correct matplotlib egg. We then found that IDLE was not showing the plotting window despite the ion() or show() commands. Both iPython and executing the python script from the terminal work, though. So, the latest plotting issue seems to be an IDLE problem (maybe some config, path issue).
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what was it about matlab that makes you want to phase it out?
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@david The main reason is that I want to be on an open source platform.
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[…] I’m totally committed to Julia now. It is blitzing fast and very similar to Matlab with some small differences (improvements). I particularly like the fact that when you declare an array with one argument, like x = zeros(10), it immediately gives you a vector of length 10 and not a 10 X 10 matrix. The broadcast function is also very useful. There are still many things I don’t yet know how to do in Julia like how to import and export data. Plotting is also not fully solved. I’ve been using PyCall to import matplotlib.pyplot, which works pretty well but not perfectly. There are things I miss in Matlab like context dependent history recall, i.e. I can recall an old command line by just typing the first few letters. If anyone knows how to do this in Julia please let me know. Right now, I’m hitting the uparrow button continuously until I find the line I want. I do worry that my abandoning Matlab means someone will lose their job, which is certainly not my intention. However, I am well ahead of schedule for zero Matlab. […]
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