Re: Is it GUI? Or is it IDE?

[Mike Miller]

On Tue, Aug 28, 2012 at 02:01:55AM -0500, Daniel J Sebald wrote:
> On 08/27/2012 12:28 PM, Michael D Godfrey wrote:
> >Has there been enough chance for review to
> >say it is time to make the switch from GUI to IDE?
> >
> >The sooner the better, I would say.
> 
> Hasn't been enough feedback yet.  Max?  Carnë?  Jordi?  Others?

My opinion is that it's simply Octave. It's a graphical (GUI) mode of
Octave, but in time people will just think of it as Octave. To me, that
was the point of integrating it into the primary executable. My hope is
that over time it will become less important what the name of the mode
is, it will just be Octave.

To compare, when I run gvim or emacs and they bring up their
non-console-mode GUIs, I don't think "Vim GUI" or "Emacs GUI", nor IDE,
they are just vim and emacs.

> There is still an open question from John about what the perceived
> expected nomenclature is for a user interface.

I doubt anyone has statistics, but my perception is that users are
asking for a GUI.

> I'll pose a couple more open ended questions:
> 
> Does this new interface qualify as an IDE, either now or in the future?

I don't see it as an IDE. To me an IDE is for software development.
There has to be some value-added specifically to a programming /
software development task. Our GUI for Octave is a graphical shell. It
does everything that console-mode Octave does, just in a different
representation.

> What confusion can be created by choosing either expression?

Octave users often do not think of themselves as programmers, to
paraphrase Jordi. If they see Octave IDE, they may think that concept is
not appropriate to their task.

In summary, I do not think IDE is entirely accurate or appropriate. I
think GUI is more vague, but better than IDE. Either way, I think the
program should be referred to as Octave, and any term like GUI should be
used only to distinguish Octave's graphical mode from Octave's console
mode.

-- 
mike