Re: Replacing Matlab by Octave in ULB

[antonio palestrini]

2007/1/22, Stefan de Konink <address@hidden>:
> On Sun, 21 Jan 2007, Nicolas Pettiaux wrote:
>
> > What is your experience about matlab vs octave, especially in
> > Universities, research institutions and companies ?
>
> I'm a student in the University of Amsterdam. The biggest
> problem with the Matlab compatiblity were extensions (like the
> visualisation toolkit). The IDE of Matlab allowed some handy debugging,
> for experienced users. And some functions work different or are not
> available.

Regarding software we all have different tastes and this is fine, but
your answer
contains some points not perfectly consistence. From one hand It is
asserted that Octave do not possess visualization toolkit and from the
other you suggest to use python/c stuff that requires more programming
skills. Since students study numerical analysis probably the command
line is a not so bad starting point in order to understand algorithms
and Octave seems to be very simple to learn. Furthermore,  since
Octave is intended for numerical analysis is really difficult to
imagine numerical libraries  second year students may need that are
not in the Octave core (not to mention octave-forge) .. see for
example

http://www2.math.uic.edu/~hanson/mcs471octave.html

The real problem is the windows environment simply because it is less
easy to interact with others programs (but probably windows users may
solve this problem with cygwim .. I don't know) and the look of the
command line is not so nice as in linux .. I know that this is sad but
from my experience students over-consider aesthetic stuff :-(

ciao
antonio



--
Prof. Antonio Palestrini
DSGSS - University of Teramo, Italy
e-mail: address@hidden