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How can Octave give a better user experience than Matlab?
From: |
LachlanA |
Subject: |
How can Octave give a better user experience than Matlab? |
Date: |
Sun, 10 Apr 2016 20:20:25 -0700 (PDT) |
PhilipNienhuis wrote
> Then the other issue:
> Was Octave created to be a Matlab clone, gratis or not?
>
> When I show the Octave GUI to colleagues who otherwise use Matlab, many
> of them react with "... all pirated from Matlab...". That hurts; yet I
> know it is just about cosmetics.
Greetings Philip / all,
IMHO, Octave should be aiming to give a better developer experience than
Matlab.
I think it is documented that Octave was not created with reference to
Matlab. However, as it stands, I believe that Octave's usefulness *is*
primarily as a high quality Matlab clone, with regard to the language it
supports. That means that language extensions such as automatic
broadcasting will not be useful to a large fraction of users.
The development environment is a place where we *can* give enhancements. I
would like Octave to be a better place to develop Matlab code than Matlab
is.
The question is: What can we do to make debugging / refactoring / version
control / documentation / navigation etc. easier? In particular, what can
we do that isn't copying Matlab?
A few are mentioned at [http://wiki.octave.org/Projects#Programming], but
most of those seem to be about making it better for programming C++, rather
than .m files.
Some thoughts are:
- "stop when XYZ". I often find a variable has a value I didn't expect, and
want to know when that value was assigned to it. It would be nice (but
slow!) to check after each statement if a condition is satisfied.
- being able to drag a conditional breakpoint to a different line (rather
than opening it, copying the condition, deleting it, and creating a new
conditional breakpoint).
- More informative error messages.
- Better hyperlinking / see-also of documentation.
Some features from Matlab that would be nice are:
- multiple nesting of "debug mode" -- that is, if a function run from the
"debug>" prompt issues "keyboard", then dbstop should go back to the outer
level of "debug mode", rather than exiting totally.
- Highlighting syntax errors in the editor
- Hovering over a variable in the editor displays its value
It may be useful to have a prioritised list added to the Wiki projects page.
Thoughts?
Lachlan
--
View this message in context:
http://octave.1599824.n4.nabble.com/Re-regarding-location-of-Matlab-compatible-polygon-functions-tp4676164p4676213.html
Sent from the Octave - Maintainers mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
- Re: regarding location of Matlab compatible polygon functions, (continued)
- Re: regarding location of Matlab compatible polygon functions, Carlo De Falco, 2016/04/14
- Re: regarding location of Matlab compatible polygon functions, LachlanA, 2016/04/10
- Re: regarding location of Matlab compatible polygon functions, PhilipNienhuis, 2016/04/12
- Re: regarding location of Matlab compatible polygon functions, Olaf Till, 2016/04/12
- Re: regarding location of Matlab compatible polygon functions, Philip Nienhuis, 2016/04/12
- Re: regarding location of Matlab compatible polygon functions, Olaf Till, 2016/04/13
- Re: regarding location of Matlab compatible polygon functions, edmund ronald, 2016/04/13
- Re: regarding location of Matlab compatible polygon functions, Mike Miller, 2016/04/13
- Re: regarding location of Matlab compatible polygon functions, Philip Nienhuis, 2016/04/13
- Re: regarding location of Matlab compatible polygon functions, Carnë Draug, 2016/04/14
How can Octave give a better user experience than Matlab?,
LachlanA <=