Re: Compatability and an engineer's perspective

[Laurent Hoeltgen]

Hi,

On 07/15/2012 06:17 AM, Jonathan Lister wrote:
> Hello Octave Maintainers,
> 
> I am a Mechanical Engineer and I am interested in helping with Octave
> Development.  I am fairly competent with MATLAB and I use it quite
> frequently at work.  I also have done a lot of MATLAB deployable
> applications with guis.
> 
> I've been watching Octave mature for some time now.  One concern that I
> have is the trend to move away from compatibility with MATLAB.  Allowing
> endfunction, endfor, etc... makes sense for making Octave a nicer language
> from a programmers point of view, but it does not help engineers grab
> pieces of Octave code and use them in MATLAB.  (Key for allowing a build up
> of confidence in the product)

If a developer of a certain octave program wants his code to be
incompatible with MATLAB by using octave sepcific features, it is his
choice. I don't see any problem with this. Besides, octave is free, if
it doesn't run in MATLAB, just run it in octave... Furthermore, octave
has certain features that are not present in MATLAB, but which are very
convenient. For example I have been exploiting "parcellfun" quit a lot
in octave and to my knowledge it is not present in MATLAB. The usage of
parcellfun made my code run 15% faster than in MATLAB.

> 
> I've adapted and can very quickly convert an Octave Toolbox to MATLAB, but
> having a good automatic converter would be much better.
> 
> If you want to attract MATLAB users to switch to Octave you need to make
> compatibility a top priority.  Our company researched what is the most
> common language that Engineering students acquire through their studies in
> American universities, the answer was MATLAB.
> 
> We've looked into alternatives such as Python, Scilab, R, and Octave.  As
> Octave continues down the road of making its syntax more and more distinct
> from MATLAB it becomes a less viable option.  In my professional opinion if
> I had to learn a new language I would go for Python.

Have you tried these languages? Python and R serve completely different
purposes than octave (and MATLAB). Scilab uses its own syntax which is
far less compatible with MATLAB than octave's. If I remember right, the
scilab developers don't even aim for compatibility.

> 
> I'm not trying to put Octave down at all.  I only want to make sure that
> everyone understands what this trend is leading to from an Engineer's
> perspective.  Right now I cannot recommend Octave as a replacement due to
> the differences in syntax, lack of handle graphics, no classdef, and no IDE.

There are plenty of IDEs for octave. In my opinion even way too many.
Whether they are good or not is another question.

> 
> The other compatibility issue I see is that the choice of FLTK for your
> widget set.  If you are not aware, all of MATLAB's UI and GUI tools are
> based on JAVA AWT and SWING.  I'm afraid the choice of FLTK will limit
> your compatibility in the future.
> 
> Let me state it again, I am not downing Octave at all.  I just want the
> community to understand you are making it harder for American Engineers to
> switch to Octave.  (IMHO)

Is there a specific reason why you emphasize so much on American
Engineers and students from American Universities in your mail?

> 
> Thanks for your time.
> 
> Jonathan
> 

Regards,
Laurent