Re: Woctave-another gui front end

[Sergei Steshenko]

----- Original Message -----
> From: delta <address@hidden>
> To: address@hidden
> Cc: 
> Sent: Wednesday, December 19, 2012 8:10 PM
> Subject: Re: Woctave-another gui front end
> 
> I'd like to put my two cents in on the matter. I use octave to get work 
> done,
> I am a USER not a programmer. One problem that I have had with open\free
> software is that it is not built for everyone, but mostly for the people
> that write the code. Because I am an electrical engineer, I use software
> (free or not) to my advantage to make myself more profitable, my goal is to
> accomplish my tasks in the shortest time possible. I like software that I
> can sit down and use without knowing anything about it before hand, this
> saves me the most time, the time that I save can then be used to read other
> things like chip documentation ect. One thing that I find with open software
> is it is software written by programmers made for programmers. It is a
> trivial thing that comes from a programming background to install\use octave
> and install all of the packages. For what my time is worth, by the time I
> familiarize myself with all of octaves nuances I might as well have bought
> the equivalent commercial package, because my time is worth money. I might
> also add that the commercial version has very little bugs, which also saves
> me time. I do donate to open source projects, but only to the one's that I
> can use, find well polished and save me time. 
> 
> 
> 


Suppose you have a piece of SW with tens of buttons and menus, and looking at 
buttons and menus you can't figure out what they are about.

Not because of poor GUI implementation, but because of the complexity of the 
problems the SW deals with.

So, you see a "Help" button.

No, just _honestly_, what is the logical difference between pressing the "Help" 
button or entering on command line

man your_program_name

or inside the program entering

help function_name

?

I myself wrote a GUI for my DSP/acoustics project with literally thousands of 
sliders, but in this case it makes sense - because I use the slider to _draw_ 
curves, i.e. I use GUI to perform _graphical_ operations.


And yes, the your time argument is _absolutely_ valid - you need to survive 
firs and only then, if you wish and have resources, to support and (alien) GPL 
cause.

But also the _money_ argument is absolutely valid - either you know and thus 
can pay less (the _attainable_ limit is 0), or you know less and pay more.

...

Using SW not knowing the fundamentals is _Very_ dangerous - I once showed how 
Butterworth filter doesn't work in both Scilab and Octave (and Scilab folks 
found out that in Matlab too) because of numeric accuracy issues.

And, actually, it can be made work if you know what to do - one needs to call 
'butter' function in a less trivial way.

...

I have just learned fundamental things about 'qcad'. Quite a GUI application, 
but I read the manual first.


Regards,
 Sergei.