| Any cross-platform IDL alternatives? [message #27168] |
Wed, 10 October 2001 13:19  |
Eric Williams
Messages: 14
Registered: April 1997
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Junior Member |
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Since RSI/Kodak is killing IDL for the Mac (and others) I am wondering if
anyone has suggestions for trying out some other cross-platform software. I
am not really worried too much about Windows but the Mac/*nix world is where
I work. We use IDL mostly for processing astronomical data and writing
procedures to play with the data visually. So a tool with a simple language
and good graphing capabilities is what we really need.
BTW, if anyone from RSI cares, I only have two Mac licenses but I have
brought 31 Solaris licenses to my campus since coming here, with plenty more
potential on the horizon. Once I have an alternative tool I will be
recommending against purchasing anymore licenses and dropping maintenance.
Too bad because I have been a huge evangelist for IDL over the years. I have
turned more than 50 students and scientists onto IDL in the last few years
which has resulted in most likely hundreds of licenses if not many more as
they have moved onto other sites. That will all stop now and I will try to
do the opposite, and probably save some money too.
Bye bye IDL, it WAS great...
--
Eric
wilersh@snet.net
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| Re: Any cross-platform IDL alternatives? [message #27179 is a reply to message #27168] |
Fri, 12 October 2001 11:14  |
Jean Koclas
Messages: 5
Registered: June 1999
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Junior Member |
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There is Mathematica by Wolfram. Granted, it is not inexpensive, but is
multi platform, and is much more useful IMHO than matlab, etc.
It has a powerful language, and has many facilities for data visualization.
And it has supported MacOS since it started up...
--
Jean Koclas
jkoclas.@alum.mit.edu
> De�: Aaron Birenboim <aaron@boim.com>
> Soci�t�: Southwest Cyberport
> Groupes�: comp.lang.idl-pvwave
> Date�: Fri, 12 Oct 2001 11:12:44 -0600
> Objet�: Re: Any cross-platform IDL alternatives?
>
> "Liam E. Gumley" wrote:
>>
>> jiali wrote:
>>> So many guys prefer matlab to IDL.
>>> There are so many .m files for download but few .pro.
>>
>> I beg to differ. When I search for a routine at
>
> In my experience, IDL pretty much owns physics,
> and part of the image processing community.
>
> MatLab is more popular with EE's (controls),
> and probobally math.
>
> I too, and looking to start using the free
> alternatives.
> --
> Aaron Birenboim | Black holes are where G-d divided
> Albuquerque, NM | by zero.
> aaron@boim.com |
> boim.com/~aaron | -Steven Wright
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| Re: Any cross-platform IDL alternatives? [message #27188 is a reply to message #27168] |
Fri, 12 October 2001 08:35 |
Stein Vidar Hagfors H[1]
Messages: 56
Registered: February 2000
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Member |
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"jiali" <jiali3@21cn.com> writes:
> So many guys prefer matlab to IDL.
> There are so many .m files for download but few .pro.
[..]
I'm a bit uncertain on what exactly you base this on... E.g. searching for
"IDL library" on Google (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=IDL+library)
gives about 61000 hits, while "matlab library" gives "about 59700"
(http://www.google.com/search?q=matlab+library). Of course, I'm not pretending
that this is reflecting the number of library files, but your claim should be
backed up by some means.. And of course even the number of available distinct
.m versus .pro files won't tell you anything about the generality or
usefulness of those files.
--
------------------------------------------------------------ --------------
Stein Vidar Hagfors Haugan
ESA SOHO SOC/European Space Agency Science Operations Coordinator for SOHO
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Email: shaugan@esa.nascom.nasa.gov
Mail Code 682.3, Bld. 26, Room G-1, Tel.: 1-301-286-9028/240-354-6066
Greenbelt, Maryland 20771, USA. Fax: 1-301-286-0264
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| Re: Any cross-platform IDL alternatives? [message #27241 is a reply to message #27168] |
Mon, 15 October 2001 13:43 |
Stein Vidar Hagfors H[1]
Messages: 56
Registered: February 2000
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Member |
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"jiali" <jiali3@21cn.com> writes:
> From the posts before: http://groups.google.com/groups?as_q=IDL%20Matlab
> I find many guys moved from idl to matlab.
And I suspect, some people who moved the other way. But we're not really
talking about the number of users, but the number of libraries.
> In addition, I failed to find a IDL butterworth filter, but there are for
> matlab.
Maybe because a butterworth filter is so close to a one-liner in IDL,
that writing it *and* documenting it, then letting each user find it,
read the documentation & use it means more work than each user writing
his own???
> My program is written in IDL, I feel so pity.
Don't bother.
--
------------------------------------------------------------ --------------
Stein Vidar Hagfors Haugan
ESA SOHO SOC/European Space Agency Science Operations Coordinator for SOHO
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Email: shaugan@esa.nascom.nasa.gov
Mail Code 682.3, Bld. 26, Room G-1, Tel.: 1-301-286-9028/240-354-6066
Greenbelt, Maryland 20771, USA. Fax: 1-301-286-0264
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| Re: Any cross-platform IDL alternatives? [message #27244 is a reply to message #27179] |
Mon, 15 October 2001 09:49 |
Amanda Kepley
Messages: 3
Registered: July 2001
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Junior Member |
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On Fri, 12 Oct 2001, Jean Koclas wrote:
> There is Mathematica by Wolfram. Granted, it is not inexpensive, but is
> multi platform, and is much more useful IMHO than matlab, etc.
>
> It has a powerful language, and has many facilities for data visualization.
> And it has supported MacOS since it started up...
Mathematica is a very poor choice for data analysis. It is difficult to
get data in and out of as well as a total memory hog. I ended up giving
Mathematica 50 Megs of memory and still having the kernel crash because
there wasn't enough memory, and that was just a project with a small data
set in an undergraduate statistics class. I don't even want to think about
trying to do any real work in it.
I've been playing with Splus (a relative of R) recently and it seems
pretty sane in the way it's constructed the language (it's all
objects). Splus has no support for Macintosh, but if R is at all similar,
it looks very promising.
Amanda Kepley
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| Re: Any cross-platform IDL alternatives? [message #27265 is a reply to message #27168] |
Sat, 13 October 2001 06:08 |
George N. White III
Messages: 56
Registered: September 2000
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Member |
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On Wed, 10 Oct 2001, Eric Williams wrote:
> Since RSI/Kodak is killing IDL for the Mac (and others) I am wondering
> if anyone has suggestions for trying out some other cross-platform
> software. I am not really worried too much about Windows but the
> Mac/*nix world is where I work. We use IDL mostly for processing
> astronomical data and writing procedures to play with the data
> visually. So a tool with a simple language and good graphing
> capabilities is what we really need.
There are open source tools whose capabilities substantially overlap those
of IDL. Many of these tools can easily be ported to MacOS-X. Even if
MacOS-X is heavily adopted in the technical community there will, for many
people/tasks, be viable alternatives to IDL. Thus it is far from certain
that sales of IDL for OSX would generate the required return on
investment.
It is also worth noting that the cost of supporting multiple platforms
involves more than just the cost of porting code. A big part of IDL's
advantage over open source tools is performance, and that often means
tuning algorithms to suit the hardware. If you want to support a wide
range of hardware you end up either using more generic approaches that
affect performance on all platforms or developing platform-specific
implementations of the core algorithms. In the long run, IDL may need the
sort of major transformation to core algorithms that was done by Mathworks
when they moved from LINPACK to LAPACK for the linear algebra core.
I don't think any open source package compares with IDL in all aspects,
but there are certainly packages with comparable capabilities for many
specific tasks. With open source, however, there is no advertising
budget, so you may have to invest considerable effort to track down an
open source package that meets a particular set of requirements.
For "a simple language and good graphing capabilities" candidates include
the R language: http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html, Python:
http://www.python.org/topics/scicomp/plotting.html, and the various Matlab
clones.
> BTW, if anyone from RSI cares, I only have two Mac licenses but I have
> brought 31 Solaris licenses to my campus since coming here, with
> plenty more potential on the horizon. Once I have an alternative tool
> I will be recommending against purchasing anymore licenses and
> dropping maintenance. Too bad because I have been a huge evangelist
> for IDL over the years. I have turned more than 50 students and
> scientists onto IDL in the last few years which has resulted in most
> likely hundreds of licenses if not many more as they have moved onto
> other sites. That will all stop now and I will try to do the opposite,
> and probably save some money too.
Would Kodak/RSI and the current IDL user base be better off if the IDL
command line interpreter was converted to open source? Kodak/RSI could
sell systems like ENVI written in IDL, while the user community would port
IDL (at least the command-line portions) to new platforms.
Organizations selecting tools for a large group of users were likely
to favor allocating more resources to software (e.g., by purchasing big
commercial packages like Matlab and IDL) in order to use less expensive
hardware.
In general, people who use open source tools tend to buy hardware that
provides the required performance using tools chosen for portability,
while users of commercial tools are more likely to look for the tool that
provides the required performance using more generic hardware (i.e.,
because a commercial vendor has invested considerable effort into
optimizing algorithms for the target hardware).
Matlab and IDL are suffering from similar limitations in the range of
platforms supported (e.g., Intel uniprocessors and a few unix platforms).
This means the technical computing community is becoming fragmented
between groups with problems that require high performance hardware and
parallel processing, and groups that can use hardware that runs commercial
tools. As a result, there are fewer opportunities to share code and
algorithms between the communities.
Companies who understand open source can use it to their advantage by
actively promoting third party ports of kernels to the full range of
platforms, and can use these kernels to support high level commercial
products that will be available to both communities.
--
George N. White III <gnw3@acm.org> Bedford Institute of Oceanography
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| Re: Any cross-platform IDL alternatives? [message #27267 is a reply to message #27188] |
Sat, 13 October 2001 04:13 |
web
Messages: 24
Registered: March 2001
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Junior Member |
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From the posts before: http://groups.google.com/groups?as_q=IDL%20Matlab
I find many guys moved from idl to matlab.
In addition, I failed to find a IDL butterworth filter, but there are for
matlab.
My program is written in IDL, I feel so pity.
>
> I'm a bit uncertain on what exactly you base this on... E.g. searching for
> "IDL library" on Google (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=IDL+library)
> gives about 61000 hits, while "matlab library" gives "about 59700"
> (http://www.google.com/search?q=matlab+library). Of course, I'm not
pretending
> that this is reflecting the number of library files, but your claim should
be
> backed up by some means.. And of course even the number of available
distinct
> .m versus .pro files won't tell you anything about the generality or
> usefulness of those files.
>
> --
> ------------------------------------------------------------ --------------
> Stein Vidar Hagfors Haugan
> ESA SOHO SOC/European Space Agency Science Operations Coordinator for SOHO
>
> NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Email: shaugan@esa.nascom.nasa.gov
> Mail Code 682.3, Bld. 26, Room G-1, Tel.: 1-301-286-9028/240-354-6066
> Greenbelt, Maryland 20771, USA. Fax: 1-301-286-0264
> ------------------------------------------------------------ --------------
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| Re: Any cross-platform IDL alternatives? [message #27290 is a reply to message #27168] |
Wed, 17 October 2001 01:54 |
Nigel Wade
Messages: 286
Registered: March 1998
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Senior Member |
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Karsten Rodenacker wrote:
> Are there any experiences with Python by idl users on the net? Is that
> maybe an Alternative?
>
>
I use Python and I really like it for what it's good at.
Here's the main part of a post I sent to comp.soft-sys.matlab when a thread
was running asking about MATLAB and Python.
Pro's
-----
free
embeddable and extensible (which is the main reason I chose it)
object oriented
many add-on modules (also free)
support for lists, dictionaries (associative arrays)
Numerical Python (NumPy) provides arrays of all data types (signed
and unsigned integer, float, double and complex float/double).
direct access to OS system services
fully object oriented
Con's
-----
block-structure is controlled by indentation
no structure data type
documentation quality far inferior to MATLAB's (and IDL's)
no direct support for array index operations execept a single range
(NumPy functions take() and put() do exist to do this but it's
much messier)
Specific to IDL;
extending Python can only be done by writing extensions, similar to
creating a DLM in IDL. It is, however, more difficult than writing a DLM
particularly in respect of reference counts (Python does garbage collection
on variables when the reference count is zero - decrement the ref.count
when you shouldn't and the variable can disappear on you, don't decrement
it when you should and the variable becomes a core leak).
Embedding and object orientation are it's main advantages over IDL.
If this is what you want to do Python is really good.
Not sure on the speed side but I'd guess it's quite a bit slower.
What doesn't Python have? Graphics. None at all. There are some graphics
packages available but none that I've found were much use. Certainly
nowhere near the standard of IDL direct graphics. Not a hope of object
graphics. If you need quality graphics Python is a blind alley.
--
-----------------------------------------------------------
Nigel Wade, System Administrator, Space Plasma Physics Group,
University of Leicester, Leicester, LE1 7RH, UK
E-mail : nmw@ion.le.ac.uk
Phone : +44 (0)116 2523568, Fax : +44 (0)116 2523555
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| Re: Any cross-platform IDL alternatives? [message #27342 is a reply to message #27168] |
Thu, 18 October 2001 10:05 |
Charles Allen
Messages: 2
Registered: October 2001
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Junior Member |
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>> VTK was developed by folks at GE concerned with, among other things,
>> 3-D medical data sets. Get ahold of the book.
> to IDL's object graphics and my conclusion was that it looks good but it
> seems to lack the concept of data coordinates, which I use a great deal for
> geophysical applications in IDL. If you wish to offer a different opinion
I'm not trying to be snide. I was just pointing out that this topic
is, in fact, covered in the VTK book:
8.3 Coordinate Transformation
Dataset to Global Coordinates
Global to Dataset Coordinates
The geophysical folks certainly have more coordinate transformation
issues than many other groups. I don't know if the VTK coordinate
transformation classes are good enough for what you need to do.
--
Charles Allen <charles.allen@ieee.org>
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| Re: Any cross-platform IDL alternatives? [message #27360 is a reply to message #27168] |
Wed, 17 October 2001 22:06 |
Mark Hadfield
Messages: 783
Registered: May 1995
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Senior Member |
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From: "Charles Allen" <charles@aspen.sweetshade.local>
>> * For 3D plotting there is an impressive package called VTK. It looks
nice.
>> (So far this is a plus.) However I think it's intended more for gaming &
CAD
>> than for scientific graphics. One thing it lacks in comparison with IDL
>
> VTK was developed by folks at GE concerned with, among other things,
> 3-D medical data sets. Get ahold of the book.
Well, I would do so if I intended to make heavy use of VTK, but so far I
have only made a quick assessment (over a few days) of VTK as an alternative
to IDL's object graphics and my conclusion was that it looks good but it
seems to lack the concept of data coordinates, which I use a great deal for
geophysical applications in IDL. If you wish to offer a different opinion
I'd love to hear it.
---
Mark Hadfield
m.hadfield@niwa.cri.nz http://katipo.niwa.cri.nz/~hadfield
National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research
--
Posted from clam.niwa.cri.nz [202.36.29.1]
via Mailgate.ORG Server - http://www.Mailgate.ORG
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| Re: Any cross-platform IDL alternatives? [message #27362 is a reply to message #27168] |
Wed, 17 October 2001 19:53 |
Charles Allen
Messages: 2
Registered: October 2001
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Junior Member |
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> * For 3D plotting there is an impressive package called VTK. It looks nice.
> (So far this is a plus.) However I think it's intended more for gaming & CAD
> than for scientific graphics. One thing it lacks in comparison with IDL
VTK was developed by folks at GE concerned with, among other things,
3-D medical data sets. Get ahold of the book.
--
Charles Allen <charles.allen@ieee.org>
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| Re: Any cross-platform IDL alternatives? [message #27368 is a reply to message #27292] |
Wed, 17 October 2001 13:58 |
Mark Hadfield
Messages: 783
Registered: May 1995
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Senior Member |
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From: "Karsten Rodenacker" <rodena@gsf.de>
> Are there any experiences with Python by idl users on the net? Is that
> maybe an alternative?
Maybe. I use Python for minor stuff: system maintenance utilities and the
like. From time to time I look at Numeric Python and the various scientific
add-ons.
Here are some pluses:
* The base language is very nice, much nicer than IDL or Matlab. It's much
more coherent (eg. no local variables vs heap variables distinction) and its
facilities for code organisation (modules) are much better.
* In Numeric Python, as in IDL or Matlab, array routines are written in C so
they run reasonably fast.
* Numeric Python has some nice facilities for array, slicing and dicing,
better than IDL.
* Python is Open Source with very liberal licensing.
Minuses:
* As far as I can tell, the Python base language is much slower than IDL. So
if you thought avoiding for loops in IDL was important, wait till you try
Numeric Python.
* 2D plotting is a mess. There are several alternative packages, none of
them seem very well integrated into Python. Their future is murky so it may
not be wise to put too much effort into learning them. There was a SIG
(special interest group) devoted to improving this area but it died without
achieving anything significant.
* For 3D plotting there is an impressive package called VTK. It looks nice.
(So far this is a plus.) However I think it's intended more for gaming & CAD
than for scientific graphics. One thing it lacks in comparison with IDL
Object graphics is coordinate conversion, i.e. the ability to interact with
your graphical objects in data coordinates.
*It's Open Source, so if the language needs beefing up in areas where you
find it lacking, you're relying on volunteers or yourself.
So I haven't switched!
BTW if you want to see the cool things that can be done with Python and VTK,
check out the MayaVi Data Visualizer:
http://mayavi.sourceforge.net/
---
Mark Hadfield
m.hadfield@niwa.cri.nz http://katipo.niwa.cri.nz/~hadfield
National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research
--
Posted from clam.niwa.cri.nz [202.36.29.1]
via Mailgate.ORG Server - http://www.Mailgate.ORG
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