Re: Possible (summer of code) projects for Octave

[Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso]

On 3 January 2011 13:10, Daniel Kraft <address@hidden> wrote:
> was JIT or a byte-code VM approach to speed up interpretation of
> loops and other stuff
[snip]
> Otherwise, I also read something about attempts to make use of
> multiple cores
[snip]
> Or possibly it would be best to try implementing some package for
> octave-forge which could provide some useful functionality?

There is another project which is just as important as all these even
if it's not as glamourous: Octave needs a GUI, IDE, black-on-white
terminal with antialiased fonts; whatever you want to call it, and it
needs an officially sanctioned one, in the same source tree as the
rest of Octave, or at least as a Mercurial subrepo.

The reason for this isn't technical, but social and aesthetic. Selling
Octave right now is difficult not due to its technical merits which
are many, but because people associate Octave with "a DOS application"
or "CLI only, and I don't know CLI". It doesn't matter if people who
believe these things about Octave are right or not. We are simply not
going be able to reach as many people as long as Octave doesn't have
an interface that more people are familiar with.

I think QtOctave is right now the project closest to achieving this
goal. It has many problems, but the project's overall direction is
correct. By using Qt, it solves the aesthetic problem multiplatformly,
and it already has the fluff that people expect from applications. It
doesn't have to mimic Matlab's interface, and in fact I hope it
manages to find its own style. A worksheet-like interface instead of a
glorified terminal like what Matlab does would be quite nice.

The biggest problems QtOctave right now have all stem from the awkward
terminal it creates and the IPC with Octave. I think the coupling
should be much tighter, perhaps multithreading the two into one
process. From what you say about yourself, I don't think you would be
interested in this project, because it involves almost zero
mathematical sophistication. It's just a task that really needs to be
done for Octave's sake. I mentioned this possibility anyways because
it's important.

- Jordi G. H.