Re: Octave User Interface

[David Grundberg]

Jaroslav Hajek wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 1:16 PM, Brad Ochocki <address@hidden> wrote:
>   
> > Hello,
> >
> > I am a long-time user of MatLab, and am trying to switch to GNU Octave
> > because it is open source and, well, free.  I've installed the Windows
> > Installer from Octave-Forge, and have Octave up and running.  However, I'm a
> > bit disappointed that the programme's user-interface is limited to the
> > Windows command line interface.
> >     
>
> This is caused by the fact that the intersection of the set of people
> who need specialized GUIs with the set of people who are willing to
> actually contribute to the project tends to be very small. My habits
> even evolved to the point where I tend to be disappointed by programs
> that don't offer a scriptable command-line interface :)
>
>   


True, true.

Actually I'm grown up in a GUI environment. It wasn't until the late 
nineties that I realized that GUIs wasn't the best way to communicate 
commands to a computer. Now a days I have to struggle to keep my 
complaints to myself when having to use some GUI-only interface. It's 
almost ridiculous what a difference in expressibility it is.

And let's make one thing really clear here: Writing GUI software is 
really, really hard. So the reason why Octave doesn't come with a GUI is 
simple. There's a lot of talented developers working on Octave, but they 
don't think a GUI is a priority. There's some on-and-off users that 
would like to see a GUI, but they either don't have the time or don't 
have the right experience to do it.

Octave doesn't need a GUI. Programming languages don't need buttons and 
menus. I think that the win32 console leaves much to be desired though, 
so maybe that is something worth attacking on that side. If only I could 
be forced to run Windos, that is.

David