Opinions on Matlab compatibility, Octave development

[Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso]

I was reading an old article of jwe's from 2001[1] and was
particularly interested in section 4, which I briefly cite here:

> I no longer believe that compatibility is a reasonable goal. It
> stifles innovation and places the project in the position of never
> being a leader, always being a follower, and quite far behind almost
> all the time.

> If compatibility is a goal, almost no innovation is allowed, because
> there is the potential for any new feature to be incompatible with
> future versions of Matlab. (This is not just an imagined problem—it
> has happened in the past, and I expect it will happen again.)

I am wondering, how do people feel about this at the moment? Playing
the compatibility game does seem quite boring, but it's a very
frequent request from Octave users. Furthermore, Octave has been
listed in GNU's high priority project list[2] for some time as a
replacement for Matlab.

Further down he laments:

> Octave has never developed a strong core of dedicated and competent
> developers.

This certainly seems to have changed since 2001, hasn't it? I would
have to generate a code swarm or look at it with gource, but at least
in the old one from a couple of years ago[3], there does seem to be
quite an explosion approximately in the middle the 2000's. I think
there's even a greater speedup around the time when the sources moved
to hg.

Thoughts?
- Jordi G. H.

[1] http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/Conferences/DSC-2001/Proceedings/Eaton.pdf
[2] http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/index_html/#gnuoctave
[3] http://jordi.platinum.linux.pl/movies/octave-swarm-fast-take3.ogg