octave presentation, part 2

[John W. Eaton]

On 19-Nov-2008, Jaroslav Hajek wrote:

| Feel free to suggest additions & modifications.

Your subtitle reinforces the misconception that Octave's name is
the musical term "octave" when it is really named after a person.

Please consider avoiding the term "open source" when describing
Octave.  Also, please consider avoiding the term "closed source".  See
for example http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html.  I
think it is sufficient to say that Octave is free software distributed
under the terms of the GPL and that Matlab is proprietary software.
Parts of Matlab are "open source" in the sense that it is possible to
look at the source code.

I think Matlab was started in about 1977, around the time of the
LINPACK andv EISPACK projects.  But that was Cleve Moler's original
Fortran version, and is not the basis for the one people use today.
The thing people now know as Matlab was started in around 1985.  See
http://groups.google.com/group/sci.math.num-analysis/browse_thread/thread/485e97756fa4624?ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8
for some more about that.

Work on Octave started on Feb 20 1992.  Discussions about some
kind of software to go along with a textbook may have occurred as
early as 1988, but that was definitely not Octave, or anything like
the beginning of the work on it.  We (Jim Rawlings and I) were just
discussing the idea of writing some subroutine libraries for
educational use.  The evolution of our thinking into something that
would result in Octave came several years later.

Maybe replace "increment operators (++, +=...)" with "increment and
compound assignment operators (++, *=, ...)"

Please don't write GNUPlot as that reinforces the misconception that
gnpulot is somehow part of the GNU project.  It is not, and is not
even distributed under the GNU GPL.  See the gnuplot FAQ for more
details.

Although it may be useful to show comparisons like this, it is also
possible that you will give the wrong impression, that Octave is just
hopelessly behind, and, worse, that people should just wait until "the
Octave team" implements all the missing features.  So during your
presentation, I hope you will stress that Octave is developed by
volunteers (in about ten days, myself included) so in order for it to
improve, we need people to get involved in the process, and that there
are a lot of ways to help even if you are not a C++ wizard.

jwe