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Musing on IDL's Future Direction [message #63650]

Sun, 16 November 2008 08:40

David Fanning
Messages: 11724
Registered: August 2001

Senior Member

Folks,

Jumping through more hoops to create both display and
PostScript output this morning got me thinking about
our old Top 10 list. I was surprised to see we started
that in July 2000. Whoa! It seems like only yesterday.

There were 159 posts in that thread, and a lot of good
ideas. Just browsing through them now, I found, well,
one that was implemented. We now have the COMPLEMENT
keyword in the Where function. You could count that
as progress, I suppose. (There may have been more, but
after a couple of pages I was too depressed to read
further.)

I am not unmindful of the fact that IDL is a lot of
things to a lot of users, and that one person's
nonsense is another person's essential feature, but
really...

If ITTVIS could just spare one engineer for six
months or so to work on a couple of things that
were important to research users of IDL it would make
a tremendous difference to a lot of people. I've had
two e-mails *this morning* from people confused about
the PostScript device, and it is not an unusual morning.

There is too much cynicism showing in this newsgroup
lately to risk another Top 10 List. (And, given the
success of our last campaign, maybe it would be better
from a psychological point of view to start a Bottom
10 List. More chance of it getting implemented, probably.
But I digress, and in completely the wrong direction!)

I guess my point is this. There are a lot of people,
myself included, who use and are extremely happy with
what I have come to think of as IDL's "old" features.
Line plots, image display, good ol' direct graphics,
sent to a PostScript file for nice output. We could
be made happy and a LOT less cynical, I think, if
along with the bright new gewgaws someone threw in a
lagniappe of a PostScript device that worked the way
it was suppose to work in this day and age.

Cheers,

David

--
David Fanning, Ph.D.
Fanning Software Consulting, Inc.
Coyote's Guide to IDL Programming: http://www.dfanning.com/
Sepore ma de ni thui. ("Perhaps thou speakest truth.")

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[Message index]

		Musing on IDL's Future Direction By: David Fanning on Sun, 16 November 2008 08:40
		Re: Musing on IDL's Future Direction By: David Fanning on Tue, 18 November 2008 08:08
		Re: Musing on IDL's Future Direction By: Craig Markwardt on Tue, 18 November 2008 07:52
		Re: Musing on IDL's Future Direction By: Mirko.Vukovic[1] on Tue, 18 November 2008 05:21
		Re: Musing on IDL's Future Direction By: Craig Markwardt on Mon, 17 November 2008 21:18
		Re: Musing on IDL's Future Direction By: Kenneth P. Bowman on Mon, 17 November 2008 07:22
		Re: Musing on IDL's Future Direction By: pgrigis on Mon, 17 November 2008 07:57

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