Re: Octave in Universities

[Quentin Spencer]

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



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