| Re: IDL vs Yorick? [message #32500 is a reply to message #32374] |
Fri, 11 October 2002 07:52  |
Craig Markwardt
Messages: 1869
Registered: November 1996
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Senior Member |
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Ralf Flicker <ralf@astro.lu.se> writes:
> At the risk of reiterating an old debate (if there was one), I
> would like to hear people's opinions about the open source
> interpreted language called Yorick.
Greetings Ralf--
I meant to answer this a long time ago, but it just scrolled too far.
I am not surprised that Yorick can outperform IDL in some areas. The
author, David Munro, has put a lot of effort into scaleability.
Also, Yorick has some wonderful variations on the IDL syntax. While
for the most part Yorick is very close to IDL, there are some areas,
like array indexing, where Yorick is clearly superior. There are all
sorts of novel ways to index arrays. And things like my CMAPPLY or
JD's median or variance kludges come naturally because you can apply
functions directly to the dimensions of an array.
That being said, I think that Yorick is currently not a viable
candidate for me, and I'll say why:
1. Close-to-non-existent user community. There's no mailing list or
newsgroup that I know of.
2. Close-to-non-existent development. I can see that Munro is slowly
developing a new version, 2.0, but this has happened over 4 or 5
years. This is not to mean any discredit to Munro! Quite the
opposite. His is fantastic design, but unfortunately it's only
him as far as I can see.
3. Poor debugging. I never figured out how to debug from the command
line.
And the most important reasons:
4. Little or no third-party libraries. Of course this is
self-defeating :-) There won't be third party libraries until
people develop for it. On the other hand, the very basic things
like curve fitting are missing, or are tack-ons.
5. My own huge sunk investment in IDL code. I have something like
100k lines of code written in IDL in my personal library, plus lots
of custom scripts etc. That would be 98% wasted if I switched to
Yorick.
Reason number 5 is certainly the most frustrating, and yet like a
crack cocaine addict, I come back for more.
Reasons 4 and 5 have led me to conclude that the only viable
alternative to IDL must at the very least have some form of
"compatibility mode" which runs 99.5% to 99.9% of existing code with
no changes. And I'm serious about those percentages. With a 100k
line library, I don't want to be making more than a hundred or so
changes to be compatible with something else.
Craig
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