Re: How does Octave shine?

[Joe Koski]

on 9/22/06 3:19 PM, Stefan de Konink at address@hidden wrote:

> On Fri, 22 Sep 2006, Jordi Gutierrez Hermoso wrote:
> 
>> On 22/09/06, Jordi Gutierrez Hermoso <address@hidden> wrote:
>>> On 22/09/06, Pav, Steven E <address@hidden> wrote:
>>>> said that he didn't mind people using octave because ``it whets
>>>> their appetite for the real thing,''
>>> 
>>> Holy crap... I'm extremely annoyed by that comment.
>> 
>> And I'm even more embarrassed I said that out loud to the entire list
>> instead of privately as I intended.
> 
> Don't be. Mathworks is not the only company with bad license servers and a
> reputation to piss off people. Maplesoft was so kind to include and accept
> all code brought in by mathematicians and the price only got higher for
> each release because of the 'superb' algorithms. I never had to setup a
> Matlab license server but Maple's one already pissed me off so badly that
> I started looking at other stuff.
> 
> 
> Yours Sincerely,
> 
> Stefan de Konink
> 

Stefan, Jordi,

Back about 1982, I went to a local seminar. It was Cleve Moler, then a
professor at Univ. of New Mexico, and he was discussing the advantages of
the use of Macsyma, now Maxima, for symbolic algebra and calculus. Over the
years I used Maple, which was free to users of the MFE (Magnetic Fusion
Energy) network back in the '80s. This thread has tied all of these software
packages together.

By the way, the Maxima project just released maxima-5.10.0, and it built and
checked on my Mac (via clisp-2.39) without problems. The implementation is
better than anything I had back in the '80s on the VAX, especially the
graphics, which use the old familiar gnuplot. Their website is
http://maxima.sourceforge.net/

Joe