Re: Problems with QtOctave

[pathematica]

There is another point that has echoes from the Preface of the manual. It is
noted that Octave was developed so that students of chemical engineering
could concentrate on understanding the principles of that field rather than
debug Fortran code. 

There is a tension between leaving Octave in a form that makes it a powerful
tool suitable for exploitation by those that understand the significance of
the operations it undertakes and providing "short cut" functions that speed
things up but allow gaps in knowledge. For example, recently I calculated
principle components long hand only subsequently to find that there exist
useful functions in an add on package. I consider that functions missing
from Octave compared with Matlab, (eg routines for some boundary value
problems) do not spoil Octave as the problems might be solved directly
providing the necessary insight exists. These are useful areas to invest
time as the reward (mathematical insight) is worthwhile.

I contrast, whilst I greatly admire Emacs and Vim and I wished I had the
skills to use them, unfortunately I don't think it would be a good use of my
time. 
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