Re: Comfortable Octave usage on Windows

[Przemek Klosowski]

   Thanks for your sincerity!Now it becomes clear for me that I'm not the
   target user the developers of octave expect. I don't use linux, I
   don't compile my own codes, and I don't use software with which I feel
   unconfortable. Simplistic? May be.

   What I don´t understand is why you pursue compatibility with matlab.
   Obviously matlab is commercial software intended for second class
   users like me. Why not better define a better code for you yourselves?
   Moreover, an enough complex code could keep away those annoying people
   which sometimes come arround asking how to change the background
   colour or some other pathetical question...

Dear Colleagues,

this discussion somehow deteriorated to a point that I would like to 
apologize to Mr. Enrique. I can't speak for others on the list, but
I certainly don't feel that people asking for an Octave GUI are deficient
in any way, and I am sorry if we imputed otherwise.

I would like to appeal to everyone to refrain from deriding other
Octave users. I think we won't be wrong, and certainly we'll come out
as more polite, if we respond in the assumption that people asking
questions are competent in their own problem domain, and are simply
asking for guidance in using Octave to solve their problem.  As such,
they deserve an honest and unbiased answer, even if the answer is that
they cannot at present have what they are asking for.

Having said that, Mr. Enrique, Octave is a tool created and used 
by the worldwide group of people, to satisfy their specific needs.
The authors put a lot of effort to get Octave to work as well as
it does, and presumably they're happy with it---or else they would
have moved to another system. If you see a deficiency that prevents
you from productively using Octave, you have this choice:

- fix the deficiency yourself. This is the optimum solution because
  all the other Octave users benefit from your insight and work,
  and it is the way in which Octave was developed.

- convince someone else to fix the deficiency. This can be done
  by paying someone to do the work, or making a good enough argument
  to convince other people that it's worth doing.

You asked for a more polished GUI, and you were told that there isn't
one. Many of us use Octave daily without it, but you may remain
unconvinced, and in that case, you have other options. Scilab and R
have attractive GUI and data graphing capabilites, and of course
commercial Matlab provides them as well. It is pointless to be
asserting that Octave must have them too, just as it would be
pointless to try to convince Mathworks that Matlab is too expensive
and should be distributed for free. 

I would encourage you to try to use Octave as it is today. It is 
an excellent and precise numerical computation tool, with many
libraries and algorithms at your disposal. You may need to 
complement it with more tools: code editors, publication-quality
graphic packages, etc. I believe you will find it productive and
rewarding in the long term.