| Re: IDL alternatives? [message #4421] |
Wed, 31 May 1995 00:00  |
patterso
Messages: 36
Registered: February 1995
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Member |
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Charles Cavanaugh (cavanaug@uars1.acd.ucar.edu) wrote:
: I will grant you that lack of an executable creator tool is a major deficit, but
: it is my opinion that of all the other deficits you mentioned, none are problems
: for competent, thorough programmers and engineers.
I agree. But not everybody using IDL is a trained programmer.
Tools like these would help.
: Maintaining poorly written
: code is a problem in every language, and nothing (again in my opinion) specific
: to IDL makes this problem worse.
Agree. But some of the most powerful feautures of IDL
also allow you to write bad code very easily if
you are not careful. I wasn't trying to single out IDL in
this respect. I know it is easy to write bad code in C or
whatever language.
: And as far as a lack of an integrated environment,
: this is almost a given in the UNIX world.
I love these sorts of comments :) I moved into Unix from VMS and
when I complain that I miss some of the integrated tools that
VMS had, I always get "that's the way it is in Unix" answers.
Just because they don't exist, doesn't mean there isn't a need
for them. Your Fortran 90 and Lisp examples show that :)
(But I don't want to start any "my OS is better than
your OS" flame wars here)
: IDL is also the best tool I've ever used for fast data-visualization prototyping. I have
: used Fortran and NCAR Graphics, but what took me a day with those languages takes me
: only a few hours with IDL.
Agreed. But because it is so easy to quickly develop applications,
it also means that many "quick hacks" become part of bigger and
bigger programs. I would guess that most IDL applications
are not developed under strict software control, etc, but just
"grow".
: Sorry about my long diatribe, but I'm still not convinced that IDL is the black
: sheep of the computer language family.
I don't think IDL is the black sheep either. But I don't necessarily
agree that because it has the same short-comings as other languages,
that these short-comings should be accepted.
At the very least, I think IDL needs a more useful debugging
environment.
Tim Patterson
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