How can Octave give a better user experience than Matlab?

[LachlanA]

PhilipNienhuis wrote
> Then the other issue:
> Was Octave created to be a Matlab clone, gratis or not?
> 
> When I show the Octave GUI to colleagues who otherwise use Matlab, many 
> of them react with "... all pirated from Matlab...". That hurts; yet I 
> know it is just about cosmetics.

Greetings Philip / all,

IMHO, Octave should be aiming to give a better developer experience than
Matlab.

I think it is documented that Octave was not created with reference to
Matlab.  However, as it stands, I believe that Octave's usefulness *is*
primarily as a high quality Matlab clone, with regard to the language it
supports.  That means that language extensions such as automatic
broadcasting will not be useful to a large fraction of users.

The development environment is a place where we *can* give enhancements.  I
would like Octave to be a better place to develop Matlab code than Matlab
is.

The question is: What can we do to make debugging / refactoring / version
control / documentation / navigation etc. easier?  In particular, what can
we do that isn't copying Matlab?

A few are mentioned at [http://wiki.octave.org/Projects#Programming], but
most of those seem to be about making it better for programming C++, rather
than .m files.

Some thoughts are:
- "stop when XYZ".  I often find a variable has a value I didn't expect, and
want to know when that value was assigned to it.  It would be nice (but
slow!) to check after each statement if a condition is satisfied.

- being able to drag a conditional breakpoint to a different line (rather
than opening it, copying the condition, deleting it, and creating a new
conditional breakpoint).

- More informative error messages.

- Better hyperlinking / see-also of documentation.



Some features from Matlab that would be nice are:
- multiple nesting of "debug mode" -- that is, if a function run from the
"debug>"  prompt issues "keyboard", then dbstop should go back to the outer
level of "debug mode", rather than exiting totally.

- Highlighting syntax errors in the editor

- Hovering over a variable in the editor displays its value

It may be useful to have a prioritised list added to the Wiki projects page.

Thoughts?
Lachlan



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