Re: octave-4.0.0-rc2 windows binary seems to be uploded

[Richard Crozier]

On 26/03/15 11:01, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:
> On Thu, 2015-03-26 at 08:17 +0100, address@hidden wrote:
> > I think that an early contact with calculus and programming is
> > important for students' learning cursus.
>
> I think there are far better programming languages than Matlab and
> Octave. I see Octave's purpose as giving people the ability to run
> existing Matlab code, but the overall goal in my opinion should be to
> move to better programming languages. For teaching purposes, I would
> consider Python instead:
>
>      http://hplgit.github.io/edu/uiopy/sphinx-fenics_minimal2/index.html
>
> If you must teach Octave to your students, I hope you really do teach
> Octave, and not Matlab. I deem it a great disservice to indoctrinate
> students to become Mathworks serfs. Bruce Schneier's commentary also
> applies here:
>
>      https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/12/feudal_sec.html
>
> - Jordi G. H.

Having now used Matlab and Octave for some years, and now used python 
(2.x) for a few, my opinion is that for numerical work the syntax of 
Octave for matrices and arrays is far superior. Python is really clunky 
this way.

It's also a right pain that python does not reload modules when they are 
modified, you have to do it manually, and the easiest method for doing 
this has been removed in python 3, whereas my octave and matlab code 
changes are noticed immediately without me having to do anything (except 
occasionally 'clear functions'). This is what I expect from an 
interpreted language.

The lack of a built in structure like Octave's in python is also quite 
annoying (yes, I know you can implement it yourself, but then every 
little snippet you pass around using it needs the class definition, or 
it has to be imported into every file you use it in). By comparison 
accessing and creating python dicts which are the closest equivalent is 
clunky and long-winded.

Python's meaningful whitespace is also an awful idea that I hate.

For these reasons, despite it's flaws I prefer to work in Octave/Matlab 
for engineering work, and prototyping algorithms.

Ideally you would teach both, because python is a much better 
general-purpose language, that's used everywhere. Also matlab now lets 
you call python code, the same way it does for java:

http://uk.mathworks.com/help/matlab/call-python-libraries.html?refresh=true

This is something I would also like to see in Octave, and would help 
people transition to python if you believe this is the way forward.

Richard




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