|
From: | Quentin Spencer |
Subject: | Re: Octave in Universities |
Date: | Tue, 14 Mar 2006 11:20:42 -0600 |
User-agent: | Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.7-1.1.fc4 (X11/20050929) |
Henry F. Mollet wrote:
I tried MATLAB at the same time I've started using OCTAVE and noticed that there was no GUI to speak of and continued using OCTAVE. Why is it so difficult to provide a proper GUI or a combination of GUI and command line interface (CLI). The people with good memory can use the much faster CLI, others can use the GUI which will also write the commands to the CLI window and now they can be used there and modified if necessary if one does not want to go back to the GUI. I need a little help to get started with the CLI each time. In particular, if my uses are weeks or months apart. At one time we only had CLI, then came the Mac with a user-friedly GUI, then came Windows copying the Mac GUI. Now OS X is Unix-based, a Terminal window is available for most efficient use, and unfortunately I rarely remember the commands. Octave is similar, I cannot remember the commands from one day to the next, and have to look them up in the manual or using help each time.
Yes, but don't you have to do the same thing in the Matlab GUI when you forget the commands? I guess I agree with John on this--the GUI offers some nice features, and for many applications it helps quite a bit for beginners, but for Matlab/Octave, I don't see what difference a GUI makes for learning the language. If I recall correctly, Matlab didn't have a GUI until version 6 or so--maybe it's not an issue for me because I started using Octave before the Matlab GUI existed (and even then I found the early versions unstable, slow, and buggy on Windows, and ugly on Linux).
-Quentin ------------------------------------------------------------- Octave is freely available under the terms of the GNU GPL. Octave's home on the web: http://www.octave.org How to fund new projects: http://www.octave.org/funding.html Subscription information: http://www.octave.org/archive.html -------------------------------------------------------------
[Prev in Thread] | Current Thread | [Next in Thread] |