Re: Criticisms against Octave

[Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso]

On 5 February 2012 10:30, Michael Goffioul <address@hidden> wrote:
> And most of the comments were different than the standard
> "for-loops-suck" or "where's-simulink", I found them quite
> interesting.

All of these have been brought up before. The "no GUI" one is so
frequent that we finally have something towards that direction in
Savannah. Here is someone else complaining about the lack of a fixed
package, although he did try to help to get it working again:

    
http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-octave-devel/2012-January/008296.html

Requests for other GUIs is something I keep hearing too, but not in
mailing lists. I've heard it mostly over chat. The high-level FPGA
tool seems to a "no simulink" complaint to me. The lack of hardware
I/O (haven't people done that with sockets or similar things in
Octave?) may be more novel.

I still however don't see a great value in those complaints. Are you
feeling suddenly very motivated to fix the fixed package or to
implement a FPGA tool? Do you think these complaints make Octave
better? I'm not saying you should be forbidden about complaining about
Octave, but I think complaining is not as valuable as doing something
about it. Octave isn't a product (at least, not yet). Users are not
customers. It's a community project, and it's only as valuable as the
community makes it. Everyone has something about Octave they don't
like. How many people are doing something to fix it? If you want a
better Octave, either code it or pay for it. I am unapologetic about
my response.

- Jordi G. H.