Re: The future of Octave

[Kevin Straight]

On Fri, 8 Dec 2000, David Doolin wrote:

> 
> 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
> 
Two points (keeping in mind that I am obviously prejudiced because I'm
working on a GUI right now)

1) Of course a GUI would take a lot of our "limited resources".  Our
resources are limited because for 9 years one person has been having to
run the whole show.  We need a "Core Team" and a "GUI Team" who do there
own think (but talk to each other enough to avoid problems)

2) A _PROPERLY DESIGNED_ GUI is abstracted from the numerics.  This is
something that the Windows bunch never has understood.  The GUI dosn't
have to slow Octave down because it dosn't even have to run on the same
machine as Octave.  What's more, if we do it right we could write LOTS of
different GUIs that plug into the same back-end (ie the octave we already
know and love)

3) I'm not trying to start the old OS war, but it is stupid to write a GUI
that only runs on Win32, when most of us are using Linux or Unix.  Why not
use some widget set, gtk or athena perhaps, that is available and several
of the platforms that Octave runs on?



==========================
Kevin Straight
University of Idaho
www.uidaho.edu/Šþstra9456
==========================



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