From help-octave-request at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu Fri Dec 8 16:49:55 2000 Subject: Re: The future of Octave From: Kevin Straight To: David Doolin cc: "John W. Eaton" , help-octave@bevo.che.wisc.edu Date: Fri, 8 Dec 2000 14:49:48 -0800 (PST) On Fri, 8 Dec 2000, David Doolin wrote: > > Obviously, I intend on developing my "customer" base as much as possible, > and using win32 gui makes an emininent amount of sense [1]. It is > resources in terms of development time that has been very well spent. Why > would having a "fancy gui" for octave be a bad thing? Would make the > barrier to entry too low? > > Dave D > Two points (keeping in mind that I am obviously prejudiced because I'm working on a GUI right now) 1) Of course a GUI would take a lot of our "limited resources". Our resources are limited because for 9 years one person has been having to run the whole show. We need a "Core Team" and a "GUI Team" who do there own think (but talk to each other enough to avoid problems) 2) A _PROPERLY DESIGNED_ GUI is abstracted from the numerics. This is something that the Windows bunch never has understood. The GUI dosn't have to slow Octave down because it dosn't even have to run on the same machine as Octave. What's more, if we do it right we could write LOTS of different GUIs that plug into the same back-end (ie the octave we already know and love) 3) I'm not trying to start the old OS war, but it is stupid to write a GUI that only runs on Win32, when most of us are using Linux or Unix. Why not use some widget set, gtk or athena perhaps, that is available and several of the platforms that Octave runs on? ========================== Kevin Straight University of Idaho www.uidaho.edu/~stra9456 ========================== ------------------------------------------------------------- Octave is freely available under the terms of the GNU GPL. Octave's home on the web: http://www.octave.org How to fund new projects: http://www.octave.org/funding.html Subscription information: http://www.octave.org/archive.html -------------------------------------------------------------