Re: Octave in Universities

[Guillem Borrell Nogueras]

I teach Matlab in the School of Aeronautics in the Universidad Politecnica de 
Madrid in Spain.  All the examples designed to be identical in both languages 
and to run identically in both interpreters.  I encourage everyone to use 
Octave instead of Matlab in small scripts when no exotic toolbox is needed. 
The mean programming knowledge in the school is near to zero, this means that 
my course is more an introduction to scientific programming than an 
introduction to Matlab and Octave.

I also wrote some extensive lecture notes about Matlab and Octave in spanish 
to promote the use of Octave.  I talked about them about one month ago in 
this list. The conclusion of the notes is: Matlab has more functions but 
Octave is a more interesting, enjoyable and powerful tool.

When I ask some feedback about Octave the complaints are always the same (the 
well known weaknesses of Octave)
-  No GUI (They are *not* used to the command line so they try to avoid it as 
much as possible)
-  Saving plots is difficult (idem)
-  Only a few use linux and Octave lacks some more system integration with 
Windows
-  etc...

I tried to distribute some live-cds with octave among the course attendants 
(quantian) but the effort was unsuccessful.  Well, it's linux...

In the CFD lab. in the same university we use Matlab on Linux for data 
analysis (large turbulent channels), no VTK, no OpenDX; just Matlab.  The 
general thought is that Matlab is a better tool than Octave, we can use 
Matlab... Why should we use Octave? And of course, Matlab draws the 3D 
isosurfaces easily...


-- 

Guillem Borrell Nogueras
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   guillem_at_torroja.dmt.upm.es (CFD Lab. ETSIA)



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