Re: Signal Processing GUI

[Jonathan Cole]

On Monday 05 November 2007 20:13:53 Quentin Spencer wrote:
> Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:
> > On 05/11/2007, JonCole <address@hidden> wrote:
> >> He's doing a lab for undergraduates and doesn't really
> >> want to have to teach them the syntax and command line.
> >
> > My gut reaction to this is that the command line is ten times as
> > expressive as any GUI could ever be. I am teaching a course on
> > numerical analysis right now, and I'm not afraid to tell them to bust
> > open a shell and type some commands once in a while, even if there's a
> > GUI that will let them accomplish the same task much more slowly. If
> > that's too complicated, then prior to the lecture you prepare a list
> > of commands that they can either copy-paste to the command line or
> > just have them read it from a file.
> >
> > I have my doubts that GUIs actually facilitate learning anything. Even
> > the Windows world is having a shell revival with their Microsoft
> > Windows Power Shell Plus Professional Edition Deluxe, or whatever the
> > marketable term is nowadays. Besides, it's not as if Octave's syntax
> > were complicated. And when GUIs have a reasonable implementation of a
> > command history and command completion, then we'll talk. ;-)
>
> I agree. It's kind of ironic that Octave was originally conceived as a
> high-level language that would make it possible to avoid teaching
> Fortran to undergraduates, and now we want to avoid teaching Octave to
> undergraduates.
>
> To answer the original question, though, if you're just after some basic
> Matlab-style GUI tools, I think some of the gnuplot replacement projects
> might be working on that, but I don't really know the details. If you
> want an equivalent of Simulink, there isn't one.
>
> Quentin

Thanks guys. That was my reaction, but he will only be spending one afternoon 
lab on this, and the focus is to be singal processing rather than using 
octave. Not to worry, I am sure he can find something else to do with them.

Thanks for your help.

Jon