Re: Octave workshop for Octave 3.0.0 on windows Xp

[Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso]

On 29/03/2008, Francesco Potorti` <address@hidden> wrote:
>  When a Windows user installs a program and sees a command line window,
>  the first thought is «something has gone wrong».

Until computers develop some sort of neural interface and can
understand my intent perfectly and without error, the command line is
not going to go away. It has flexibility and power that no GUI ever
will have. It's more efficient to communicate certain things to the
computer using ten fingers than only your wrist and an index finger.

Mac OS X has its terminal, and the recent shift from ksh or tcsh to
bash shows that Apple cares at least a little about the quality of the
shell they use. Even Windows Vista is seeing a shell revival with its
Windows Live Power Shell XP Professional Business Edition or whatever
the marketable term is.

I personally do think that a GNU system has the friendliest shell of
all, and that the default appearance of konsole on KDE or a Gnome
terminal is miles ahead of the ugly characters and colours of the
"DOS-like" shell in Windows. Perhaps this is part of the reason of why
we Unix-like users don't find a shell such a scary experience.

The shell is going to be around for the foreseeable future, and people
with the mathematical sophistication to understand numerical analysis
can understand how to use a shell, and they should use it in order to
speed up their computer interaction.

- Jordi G. H.