Re: Money Program Does Linux

[José Luis Gómez Dans <nospam [at] sheffield.ac.uk>]

On Tue, Feb 15, 2000 at 11:33:46AM -0000, Richard wrote:
> 
> Well, there's things like Kdevelop and Kstudio and for those who 
> don't like the KDE there's also some Gnome tools that can do the job. 
>  I've been looking into the use of Java and how easy it is to use 
> with Linux.  It *is* very nice.  But it'll be a while before we do 
> anything with it :-(  It has been used successfully on mars for one 
> of the landers and so we shouldn't ignore it.

	Oh, yes, you've got GLADE (which works fine, sort of). But the
whole point of my mumblings was that by using some sort of very high
level language, you can short circuit many of the problems associated
with C/C++. This is the beauty of Python (and perl, as same comment
applies here). Interfacing Python with Tk is quite straightforward (once
you've found the manual, that is). The whole point of Java is that you
can code in Python and get Java code out you can bung into a web page.

> erm... yeah, that's ok if the library has got some books.  I was a 
> student at Sheffield University a few years ago.  The average comment 
> that I heard was that "it's ok as a social science library goes" 
> (referring to the volumes on physics, geophysics and chemistry). The 
> only place that I see anything worth reading is in Blackwell's and in 
> the library at Caltech and UC Berkley (California).

	I could drop Stanford in as well, but that's not the point. The
point I was trying to make is that usually Multimedia stuff is rather
poor, as some one pointed out in the thread. It's content, not
presentation that counts if you try to teach something. OK, having
colourful piccies is nice, but not a must (for most things anyway :D).
But I digress, and we're going off topic here...

> At least with the multimedia stuff you can quickly put something 
> together with something like Star Office and add other things with 
> some simple programming skills.  Good way to learn physics or 
> chemistry :-)         (if you haven't done any before)

	Again, you  can do this with Scilab (which has a Tcl/Tk
interface thing). You use Scilab to do the maths bit and for the
control, and use Tcl/tk to present the information. They do this with
web pages (so you can see a demo of Scilab at it). Mupad has also an
on-line demo.

	As for the star office bit, I have used very successfully
latex2html in conjunction with Lyx. Many a jaw was dropped at the
outcome of it. 

	Anyway, my point was: CONTENT, CONTENT, CONTENT!! Look at word:
a massive piece of software, but with preciously little content.
Having said that, a subscription to ingenta.com would be a major
breakthrough to break shatter my scepticism on these matters...

	Regards,
	José
-- 
José L Gómez Dans			PhD student
					Radar & Communications Group
					Department of Electronic Engineering
					University of Sheffield UK
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