Octave vs. Matlab (was: Re: alphabetical list of Octave functions)

[John W. Eaton]

On 12-Jun-2008, Brian Kirklin wrote:

| As long as there are advantages to using Matlab over Octave there will 
| always be people who use Matlab. In particular, you rarely have to worry 
| about bugs when working with Matlab, there are significant speed 
| advantages due to JIT compiling, the graphics end doesn't crash, and 
| everything is well documented, etc.
| 
| I love Octave, but its main advantage is that it is free, and for now it 
| is still behind Matlab in a lot of the areas it needs to pick up on for 
| a company to ever outright replace Matlab. That said, I will continue to 
| use Octave because it is extremely powerful and useful, but its 
| understandable that there are still Matlab users.

I'm sorry that Octave doesn't quite measure up for you.  If you would
like to see that situation change, then please consider helping to
improve it rather than just telling us that it is inferior in oh so
many ways.  I don't think that many of the people who are working on
Octave find that kind of criticism encouraging or productive.

Meanwhile, you are funding the development of Matlab but not Octave,
yet you expect Octave to somehow equal or even exceed the features and
performance of Matlab?  How do you expect that to happen?

I'd say that given the resources we have had for Octave development,
our community has done a remarkable job.  Imagine how much better
Octave could be if we had even the small amount of funding necessary
to pay five of the most talented contributors to work on Octave full
time instead of just doing that work in their "spare" time.

How many Matlab licenses would that be?  I'd guess not many.  Perhaps
your company (and others) would be willing to divert some fraction its
budget for proprietary software to the development of free software
tools like Octave?

jwe