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


From: Giorgio De Nunzio
Subject: Re: octave-4.0.0-rc2 windows binary seems to be uploded
Date: Thu, 26 Mar 2015 17:39:20 +0100
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; rv:31.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/31.5.0

Il 26/03/2015 12:01, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso ha scritto:
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.

Hi Jordi,
thanks for sharing your thoughts.
Saying that a programming language is better than another isn't that easy, in my humble opinion. Of course it depends on what you want to do. I love python (though I am not an expert) and I agree that it is a wonderful language, perhaps (one of) the most interesting at present: simple enough, powerful, full of libraries... At the same time, in my career as a university researcher and teacher (of physics) I have found useful to teach matlab (for 9 years now) for the simple reason that many companies and research groups use it, and learning matlab is a plus for our students. Excuse me but I don't think I am giving them a disservice, or making them serfs. Moreover I am not paid by The Mathworks... Not teaching them matlab would not mean to be a revolutionary, but only to make their life a bit more difficult. At the same time I have done my best for the diffusion of octave, and now that its GUI (which is an important part of any programming environment) is becoming more and more sophisticated, I'll do that with even more certainty. Tomorrow evening I'll talk about octave to high school students, because this way I can show them a useful, simple and powerful high-level environment, and let them learn the basics of programming. This will automatically give them some matlab competence, too, that they will perhaps use some day at work.
Best
Giorgio




--
Dr. Giorgio De Nunzio
Dipart. di Matematica e Fisica "Ennio De Giorgi", Univ. del Salento
INFN Sezione di Lecce
DReAM (Laboratorio Diffuso di Ricerca Interdisciplinare Applicata alla Medicina)
ADAM (Advanced Data Analysis in Medicine) srl
Lecce (Italy)
address@hidden
address@hidden
tel +39 0832 297084-297051
fax +39 0832 297100
mobile +39 320 3829845


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