Re: I Blame Python

Lawrence =?iso-8859-13?q?D=FFOliveiro?=  <[email protected]> wrote:
>Yes, proprietary languages and toolkits are a lot less attractive
>these days, given the embarrassment of riches available in the
>open-source world. MATLAB was probably good enough at the time for its
>original use (matrix manipulation), but take advice from someone who
>had to do programming work in that language (for pay, yet): *stay well
>away* from the GUI-toolkit API, if you can help it.

That's kind of the problem.  We used to use a couple proprietary matrix
manipulation packages, MatrixX (later XMath) and Control-C, and they were
fine, but when Matlab hit the ground around version 3.0 it was just so
much faster, so much easier, and so much cheaper that it pretty much took
over that whole market.

And Matlab got better and better and in version 4 they added some great
graphics to it, and by Version 4.2C it was very zippy and very convenient.
And the support was great.  You picked up the phone and you called Cleve
and he fixed whatever was broken.

And then.... they added stuff and stuff and more stuff and it turned into
the bloated monstrosity that it currently is.  In an attempt to sell more
copies, they made it do more things, and now it does so many things that
it doesn't do anything well.  It costs a fortune now, and Cleve is sadly
no longer able to answer the phone from beyond the grave.

We still have one SunOS 4.1.4 machine running in order to run Matlab 4,
although to be honest Octave was doing as good as job for a while.  But now
Octave is succumbing to the bloat....
--scott 
-- 
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."