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Re: Match Histogram Binsize with Data Type [message #83444 is a reply to message #83442]

Wed, 06 March 2013 04:25

David Fanning
Messages: 11724
Registered: August 2001

Senior Member

Jeremy Bailin writes:

> This might make me unpopular, but I think it's doing exactly what it's
> supposed to be doing in this case. The Sky Is Falling, etc.

Yes, of course. I'm not saying it is wrong. I'm saying it is needlessly
confusing and leads people to inadvertently get the wrong values without
a word of warning that it is doing so. Histogram is in many ways the
heart of soul of IDL. If it has special requirements to make it work
correctly, then either it should (1) enforce those requirements itself
by checking to see that the requirements are met, or (2) warn users that
they are using the program inappropriately and will get incorrect
results. People will change their habits soon enough. Although God knows
there will be a few weeks where 90 percent of the IDL programming public
has to fix their damn programs!

Silently going about your business and producing incorrect results is
irresponsible at best and certainly not what you would expect from a
software company looking out for user's interest. I realize we use the
program "as is and without warranty," but this is like if the TV command
just decided to arbitrarily truncate your data to bytes before
displaying it. Oh, wait. Bad example. Uh, well, you probably understand
what I mean. People don't expect to use a function that blithely returns
incorrect results that are EXTREMELY hard to distinguish from the
correct results. So hard, I'm sure 99.9 percent of us don't know we are
being bamboozled.

Cheers,

David

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

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[Message index]

		Re: Match Histogram Binsize with Data Type By: David Fanning on Wed, 06 March 2013 05:08
		Re: Match Histogram Binsize with Data Type By: David Fanning on Wed, 06 March 2013 04:25
		Re: Match Histogram Binsize with Data Type By: Jeremy Bailin on Tue, 05 March 2013 21:32
		Re: Match Histogram Binsize with Data Type By: David Fanning on Tue, 05 March 2013 10:58
		Re: Match Histogram Binsize with Data Type By: Fabzi on Tue, 05 March 2013 10:37
		Re: Match Histogram Binsize with Data Type By: Paul Van Delst[1] on Thu, 07 March 2013 09:51

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