Re: The future of Octave

[David Doolin]

On Fri, 8 Dec 2000, John W. Eaton wrote:

> On  8-Dec-2000, David Doolin <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> | 3. Operating systems are yesterdays technology.  While I prefer command
> | line interfaces, I do not know anyone in my field (geotechnical
> | engineering) who are similarly inclined.  So further developement should
> | enfold rational gui interfaces as well.  Anyone who would insist on
> | sneering at gui's I would invite to write one.  It's harder than you
> | think.  Way harder.  Very challenging in fact.
> 
> Again, we have very limited resources.  If your goal in writing free
> software is to satisfy `customers' rather than getting together with
> fellow developers to create something useful for the developers, then
> maybe you have the right idea here.  But I believe it will suck a lot of
> resources away from the core numerical parts if you spend a lot of
> time putting a fancy gui on it.

The time I have spent putting a fancy gui on my discrete element code has 
already paid off in for two other people getting a conference trip paid
by offering a short course in how to use the program, fancu gui included,
to solve problems in rock slope stability.  Think rocks falling on
highways.  

Obviously, I intend on developing my "customer" base as much as possible,
and using win32 gui makes an emininent amount of sense [1].  It is 
resources in terms of development time that has been very well spent. Why
would having a "fancy gui" for octave be a bad thing?  Would make the
barrier to entry too low?

Dave D

[1] FWIW, the numerical core can be downloaded from 
http://www.ce.berkeley.edu/Programs/Geotech/DDA.
We plan on opening up the win32 base similar to how Peter Deutsch runs
ghostscript.


> 
> jwe
> 



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