Re: Criticisms against Octave

[Chipmuenk]

Jordi,

I understand your bitterness in saying "oh no, another troll complaining
about the free lunch who hasn't peeled a single potatoe". Obviously, doing
something is more valuable than whining, but I did not want to critisize,
I'm using Octave and I like it; I just wanted to explain why I don't use it
more intensively. You (plural) obviously put a lot of your time into Octave
which I deeply appreciate and admire.

At least, the replies to my post made me somewhat wiser: Seems it is well
known to you that the handling and building of Octave is too complicated for
many users, limiting the user base, that a GUI is on the "most wanted list"
etc.  - that was new to me. I'm not following the discussions here that
closely, I only wanted to add my 2ct what I think is keeping EE students
from using Octave. Seems also, the fixed package is not quite dead (good
news!). And the ideas about the interactive GUI also sound really exciting
to me - can't wait to see it!

- I do know that there is and will be no "Octa-Link" (which is not a great
loss IMHO) but I also don't think that it is absolutely necessary for FPGA
DSP design. A combination of some high level DSP (using Octave) and freely
(although not open source) available software and design blocks by the FPGA
vendors combined with some stimulus generation and postprocessing (Octave
once more) should do the job, at least I've done similar things in an
industrial environment a few years ago.

So, what can I do. Job and family eat up all of my time, hence, I can only
contribute something running in the same lines as my job. So far, the
official line at my university is "we need to teach students industry
standard software" (that was the reply when I suggested to support open
source alternatives to ML ... ). Still, I could (and would) secure some
money for a person working on Octave related problems (say, develop a filter
GUI or help with the "fixed" package) at OUR university. However, I'm not a
programmer and neither are my ML-using-colleagues, limiting our contributing
options to improving packages etc. I actually tried to look into the "fixed"
package myself, but maybe this package was a bit too heavy for a start. When
I find a student who is interested in these topic, I'll give it a try, but
due to the reasons stated above, the students are not too enthusiastic. I
guess, one could call it a catch-22 ...

I'll do what I can, but I think some kind of GUI and an easy to use
installer for Octave and packages under Windows (like the venerable version
3.2.4) would go a long way to attract more students.

Best regards and thanks once more for giving Octave to the community
(consumity?),

Christian

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