Re: Woctave-another gui front end

[Stephen Montgomery-Smith]

On 12/20/2012 06:31 AM, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:
> On 19 December 2012 22:38, Stephen Montgomery-Smith
> <address@hidden> wrote:
>> But as to your first point, why do you carp quite so much on people who
>> point out the lack of some feature, but don't have the time or abilities
>> to contribute?
> 
> Because I don't have the abilities nor time to contribute either, but
> I do anyways. I am quite stupid and limited in my abilities.
> 
> Octave can only improve through people like you and me. It is not
> helpful to enumerate again the ways it sucks. We know it sucks. We
> know we need a GUI. We know we need better documentation. Just stating
> these facts again and again is not useful. We only need to state them
> once, in our bug tracker:
> 
>     http://bugs.octave.org
> 
> Or if you do think it's useful to enumerate time and time again all
> the things that Octave really needs until your students can use it,
> perhaps we could have a dedicated blog like this one, but about
> Octave:
> 
>     https://abandonmatlab.wordpress.com/
> 
> Thank you for helping with Octave questions and any other involvement
> you can offer.

I think that second blog kind of misses the point of matlab or octave.
If you want a more comprehensive language that can handle matrices AND
be able to take apart text files, use a language like python.  Or do
what I do (but in a unix environment) - use octave, and glue it to other
programs using something like Perl.

What I very much like about Matlab is the very "flatness" described on
the other webpage you provided to me:
http://hplgit.github.com/edu/uiopy/uiopy.html.  It means that students
who have very limited programming experience can learn the basics of
matlab very quickly.

But I do understand his frustration, that people learn matlab, and then
act as if that is all there is.

As to your other points, I do feel that you are consistently taking my
words out of context, and making me say something a little different
than I intend.  You really did that from the first time you replied to
me.  Maybe you have seen too much real complaining from other people,
and projected what you saw of them onto me.  Anyway, I don't think we
are communicating well, so I'll stop.

Stephen