Octave review

[John W. Eaton]

On  6-Feb-2009, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:

| It's come to my attention that a writeup of mine comes as the first
| Google hit when looking for "octave review", so now I am starting to
| feel more responsible for what I wrote in it.
| 
| I rewrote it today updating what I know, but I know I probably have
| some facts wrong, and I also probably neglected to mention other
| important advantages and drawbacks of Octave as it currently stands.
| 
| Although I wouldn't want to wikify it (I want to keep my voice in it,
| as it has to be for a review) I am writing to request that anyone who
| can point out omissions or improvements to it, please do so.

Here are some comments about specific passages.

  At any rate, jwe first wrote Octave for his chemical engineering
  students, so that they would have something to work with

I've never had students.

The first sentence of the preface to the Octave manual is

  Octave was originally intended to be companion software for an
  undergraduate-level textbook on chemical reactor design being written by
  James B. Rawlings of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and John
  G. Ekerdt of the University of Texas.

so that is the real reason that I started work on Octave.

  jwe has also produced other pieces of code, such as the original man
  program that many GNU/Linux distributions use for reading the
  manpages.

This is perhaps misleading to someone who doesn't know the history of
Unix.  I was the original author of what is now the man-db package.
But there have been a number of other implementations of the man
program, and I'm not sure mine could even be considered the first used
on early GNU/Linux systems.

  Since Octave is free software, its development is quite open

The ideas of free software (the freedom to share and modify, etc.)
does not necessarily imply a collaborative development process.

  It used to be that jwe had the final authority on what code could be
  committed to the sources, but since he moved the code from an
  antiquated CVS repository to Mercurial, many other developers have
  been granted write access to the source tree, fostering a more
  bazaar-like collaboration mode

I think this confuses the details of the particular version control
system with the development model.  We could have had a more
collaborative development model with CVS.  We could use Mercurial and
still have a less collaborative development model without a publicly
available archive.

I am still the maintainer of Octave, and I still have final say on
what goes into my releases (the ones that end up on ftp.octave.org and
ftp.gnu.org), but I will of course listen to the opinions of others.
You are free to release your own version (though I would generally
recommend against forking the project).

  The syntax is identical to Matlab's syntax

It's close, but there are some differences.

  Simulink, which I've never personally used but I understand is an
  important reason for the foothold Matlab has as a de-facto standard
  in the numeric community

I think simulink is a fairly specialized tool and I don't get the
sense that it is somehow responsible for Matlab's success.

  it has been determined by the developers that implementing just-in
  time compiling for Octave is prohibitively expensive and not really
  worth it in the end

I wouldn't say it isn't worth it, but that it is not a trivial
project.

jwe