Re: Opinions on Matlab compatibility, Octave development

[Sergei Steshenko]

--- On Tue, 6/1/10, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso <address@hidden> wrote:

> From: Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso <address@hidden>
> Subject: Opinions on Matlab compatibility, Octave development
> To: "Octave-help" <address@hidden>
> Date: Tuesday, June 1, 2010, 10:46 PM
> 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
> 
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> 

Well, I think that a good tool along the lines of Matlab/Octave should be
neither like Matlab nor like Octave - however paradoxical it sound.

I.e. I think that the core engine underneath, as well as packages should
be written in a very consistent compileabale language, and that Matlab
or whatever else compatibility should be achieved by a separate/orthogonal
compiler.

Of course, such an engine shouldn't be from scratch; for example, here is
a candidate for linear algebra/matrix operations:

http://arma.sourceforge.net/
.

Since I am very much a Perl guy, I must mention PDL: http://pdl.perl.org .
I.e I hint Matlab -> Perl/PDL translator. Perl is compiled into bytecode,
by the way.

OTOH, if I understand correctly, Octave development (sometimes) is 
supported by grants, and Matlab compatibility can be a precondition of
such grants - just guessing in this case.

Regards,
  Sergei.