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> it looks like the biggest loser to Julia's rise might be Octave. It's not a competition. Julia is our friend, not a rival to Octave. We're on good terms with

by jordigh 11y ago

> it looks like the biggest loser to Julia's rise might be Octave. It's not a competition. Julia is our friend, not a rival to Octave. We're on good terms with their developers. Occasionally we share ideas and patches back and forth when it makes sense. They've asked me for help with their Octave benchmark and I've gladly provided it. Octave being unnecessary is Octave's ultimate goal. When nobody cares about Matlab, probably nobody will care about Octave either. But as long as people care about Matlab, Octave will be relevant. Or perhaps, in a perfect world, enough people will stop caring about Matlab that Octave can start leading in fixing the biggest stupidities in the programming language (we already do this to some degree, but keep relenting and replicating Matlab's bugs because code depends on those bugs). If Julia is gaining the minds of people in scientific computing, great. It's going to take them away from Matlab and Octave to equal degree. If we can all do our computing unfettered by proprietary licenses, I don't care if it means we end up using Octave or Julia as long as we stop using Matlab. And many of Matlab's alleged proponents keep turning to Octave. Octave still fills a niche that Julia does not: being able to use Matlab code freely.

placeybordeaux 11y ago
It's good to see people that have a goal beyond wanting their personal project to succeed, but rather to keep the original reason they started the project at the for front. Too often large enterprises and projects forget the reason they were started and simply try to keep themselves relevant.
- jordigh 11y ago
  Well, Octave wasn't started with the goal to take down Matlab. That became a goal later in the project's lifetime as it became clear that users were demanding it.
CptMouse 11y ago
As someone forced to do matlab/octacve in college, this is incredibly refreshing to hear. My respect for the octave team just went up considerably.
jostmey 11y ago
Just thought you might like to hear this---I love octave and use it regularly in my academic work. It is the perfect language for me to rapidly prototype out a calculation. That said, I think the future lies in porting over octave libraries and plotting capabilities to Julia.
oneJob 11y ago
Respectfully, maybe it should be a (friendly) competition. Competition motivates people. It's commonly accepted as one of the central drivers of capitalist markets. Perhaps if competition were injected in open source projects in some form it'd help the open source community compete with the proprietary community.
- jordigh 11y ago
  We already have fearsome competition: Matlab. We don't need in-fighting within team Free Software.
  - oneJob 11y ago
    Respectfully disagree with the phrase "infighting". I believe healthy competition would be good for OSS.
    - jordigh 11y ago
      You're applying a broad principle (competition is good) without considering lots of specifics. First of all, within free software, collaboration is a lot easier than competition. Sure, we should all try to be the best we can be, but if our "competition" is also free, we can just grab their stuff and re-use it. We cannot, however, grab whatever we want from Matlab and re-use it, so we do have to compete against them. Secondly, even if I agree with you that competition is great even in this case, how do you want me to modify my behaviour? To stop collaborating with Julia? To view them with more suspicion? To refuse to help them when they ask for help? I already try to match features whenever possible. The feature I'm most envious of is their JIT compiling, but it's very difficult to implement this. Vice versa, I don't think they have a goal to match our features, such as a native Qt GUI or an exact implementation of the Matlab language. Julia and Octave have lots of ideological differences too. For one, Octave is a GNU package, so it tries to adhere to the GNU coding standards and ideals. In particular, we prefer to call ourselves free software, not open source, even if both terms mean the same thing. I think the most important thing is to enable unfettered scientific computing. Julia's main goal is to provide a better language for scientific computing, while ensuring user freedom is a secondary goal. So far they have not compromised user freedom, and I hope they never do. So, there you have it, we're already competing on something?

by jordigh 11y ago

placeybordeaux 11y ago

It's good to see people that have a goal beyond wanting their personal project to succeed, but rather to keep the original reason they started the project at the for front. Too often large enterprises and projects forget the reason they were started and simply try to keep themselves relevant.

jordigh 11y ago
Well, Octave wasn't started with the goal to take down Matlab. That became a goal later in the project's lifetime as it became clear that users were demanding it.

CptMouse 11y ago

As someone forced to do matlab/octacve in college, this is incredibly refreshing to hear. My respect for the octave team just went up considerably.

jostmey 11y ago

Just thought you might like to hear this---I love octave and use it regularly in my academic work. It is the perfect language for me to rapidly prototype out a calculation. That said, I think the future lies in porting over octave libraries and plotting capabilities to Julia.

oneJob 11y ago

Respectfully, maybe it should be a (friendly) competition. Competition motivates people. It's commonly accepted as one of the central drivers of capitalist markets. Perhaps if competition were injected in open source projects in some form it'd help the open source community compete with the proprietary community.

jordigh 11y ago
We already have fearsome competition: Matlab. We don't need in-fighting within team Free Software.
- oneJob 11y ago
  Respectfully disagree with the phrase "infighting". I believe healthy competition would be good for OSS.
  - jordigh 11y ago
    You're applying a broad principle (competition is good) without considering lots of specifics. First of all, within free software, collaboration is a lot easier than competition. Sure, we should all try to be the best we can be, but if our "competition" is also free, we can just grab their stuff and re-use it. We cannot, however, grab whatever we want from Matlab and re-use it, so we do have to compete against them. Secondly, even if I agree with you that competition is great even in this case, how do you want me to modify my behaviour? To stop collaborating with Julia? To view them with more suspicion? To refuse to help them when they ask for help? I already try to match features whenever possible. The feature I'm most envious of is their JIT compiling, but it's very difficult to implement this. Vice versa, I don't think they have a goal to match our features, such as a native Qt GUI or an exact implementation of the Matlab language. Julia and Octave have lots of ideological differences too. For one, Octave is a GNU package, so it tries to adhere to the GNU coding standards and ideals. In particular, we prefer to call ourselves free software, not open source, even if both terms mean the same thing. I think the most important thing is to enable unfettered scientific computing. Julia's main goal is to provide a better language for scientific computing, while ensuring user freedom is a secondary goal. So far they have not compromised user freedom, and I hope they never do. So, there you have it, we're already competing on something?