Re: Woctave-another gui front end

[edmund ronald]

Dear all,

 I have a PhD in computer science, and used to teach AI. I wanted to
re-learn some Fourier stuff so I hunted down Octave. I don't think I
count as a beginner with computers.

 The experience of getting this thing to work on the Mac was horrid.
First I found a package, then I had to swap out Gnuplot, then it
couldn't show do image stuff, then I had to install Macports and
recompile and in the end it still couldn't do some stuff because of a
bug iof the Mac Gnuplot terminal if I remember rightly so I had to
switch to X11 and learn how to set the terminal yadda yadda. As for an
environment I use the mac Terminal.app which thankfully has cut and
paste ...

 Frankly, Octave is a beautiful piece of work, but  it suffers from
the Open Source mentality that you need to earn what you use. This is
a piece of software which one cannot recommend to anyone at a decent
university where they have a budget, simply because the time to get it
to work is 3 or four days which is more than a Matlab license would
cost. On a sidenote, the lab where I used to work dropped Matlab
because it was too expensive, but I am starting to see what they are
charging for.

Edmund