Re: Octave on Reddit

[Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso]

2010/9/29 Soren Hauberg <address@hidden>:
> I really think it would be better to spend GUI-related energy on
> OctaveDE as it has the support of other active Octave contributors.

I'm wary of GTK+, out of purely practical reasons, even though I
personally prefer GTK+ apps in my Debian laptop because they're more
GNU-like (e.g. obey Emacs keybindings). As I see it, the principal
purpose of the GUI/IDE/glorified terminal is to attract users (i.e.
potential developers). GTK+ has problems doing so, because it's
difficult to make it look pretty across platforms, while Qt has much
wider appeal and support.

I think of the recent story of Mercurial's TortoiseHg moving from GTK+
to Qt for precisely this reason. I recall that the complexity of
distributing and making GTK+ compile on Windows was also a concern. I
don't mean to be contrarian, but from a purely practical point of
view, I think a project based on Qt has greater chance of succeeding,
assuming it attracts developers. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it
doesn't strike me as if any of us has studied GUI design. I therefore
think that as far as our programming abilities are concerned, GTK+ or
Qt should be indistinguishable to us.

Or perhaps John Swensen can explain more fully why he prefers GTK+ to
Qt, perhaps my concerns are unfounded and GTK+ is a perfectly good
toolkit with which to attract users. Or perhaps attracting users isn't
the actual goal at all.

- Jordi G. H.