Compatability and an engineer's perspective

[Jonathan Lister]

Hello Octave Maintainers,

I am a Mechanical Engineer and I am interested in helping with Octave Development.  I am fairly competent with MATLAB and I use it quite frequently at work.  I also have done a lot of MATLAB deployable applications with guis.

I've been watching Octave mature for some time now.  One concern that I have is the trend to move away from compatibility with MATLAB.  Allowing endfunction, endfor, etc... makes sense for making Octave a nicer language from a programmers point of view, but it does not help engineers grab pieces of Octave code and use them in MATLAB.  (Key for allowing a build up of confidence in the product)

I've adapted and can very quickly convert an Octave Toolbox to MATLAB, but having a good automatic converter would be much better.

If you want to attract MATLAB users to switch to Octave you need to make compatibility a top priority.  Our company researched what is the most common language that Engineering students acquire through their studies in American universities, the answer was MATLAB.

We've looked into alternatives such as Python, Scilab, R, and Octave.  As Octave continues down the road of making its syntax more and more distinct from MATLAB it becomes a less viable option.  In my professional opinion if I had to learn a new language I would go for Python.

I'm not trying to put Octave down at all.  I only want to make sure that everyone understands what this trend is leading to from an Engineer's perspective.  Right now I cannot recommend Octave as a replacement due to the differences in syntax, lack of handle graphics, no classdef, and no IDE.

The other compatibility issue I see is that the choice of FLTK for your widget set.  If you are not aware, all of MATLAB's UI and GUI tools are based on JAVA AWT and SWING.  I'm afraid the choice of FLTK will limit your compatibility in the future.

Let me state it again, I am not downing Octave at all.  I just want the community to understand you are making it harder for American Engineers to switch to Octave.  (IMHO)

Thanks for your time.

Jonathan