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Re: Linux Question [message #42640 is a reply to message #42558]

Wed, 16 February 2005 19:50

mperrin+news
Messages: 81
Registered: May 2001

Member

David Fanning <davidf@dfanning.com> wrote:
> I am always amazed with what people put up with,
> but this was really an eye-opening experience.
> I recommend *anyone* who writes software for a
> living go spend a couple of months with the end-users.
> You will never be the same. :-)

I feel that someone needs to stand up here and offer a valiant defense
of the astrophysics community, but I fear it's too late and we've
all already been irrevocably branded as hopeless luddites. :-)

I think part of the problem is that IDL ships with poor default settings
in many cases. It can be configured to do the right thing, if you know
how to tweak your .idlstartup file to add some DECOMPOSED and RETAIN
keywords, etc, but you shouldn't have to do that to get reasonable
functionality! I think many astronomers come to IDL with previous experience
with things like Matlab or Mathematica, where you *don't* need to do
that sort of tweaking. Window repaints work correctly in Mathematica
right away! So when faced with IDL windows that get permanently damaged
as soon as something passes in front of them, why isn't it reasonable to
assume that's "just how IDL is"?

That's not to say I disagree completely with the tone of this thread.
There *are* a lot of people who don't understand computing nearly as
well as perhaps they should; I'd love to see more computer emphasis
added to the undergraduate physics curriculum, but the invariable
faculty response is "but there's already too much material; what
courses should we drop if we add a computer requirement or two?"
Still, I think it needs to happen sooner or later. But I see a
distinction between fundamental issues of numerical data analysis
(e.g. representation of floating-point numbers, error propagation,
algorithms, and so on) versus details specific to some individual
piece of software (setting RETAIN=2 or knowing how to convert between
DATA and NORMALIZED coordinates, or whatever). One should strive to
minimize how much of the latter one needs to know, so that you can
concentrate on the former! In my opinion, something like imdisp or
tvimage should become *standard* with IDL: too many people out there
end up learning "tv" first and then getting stuck rolling their own
more useful display codes from scratch, and that's a waste...

On a regular basis, I program in IDL, C/C++, Perl, Tcl/Tk, various
shells, and Motorola DSP assembler (and occasionally I end up in
Python or Fortran too). That menagerie of languages is my problem, not
yours, but I hope you don't fault me for wanting to get the most
science done in IDL as possible with the minimum amount of screwing
around with configuration parameters or learning language esoterica!
(Same reason why I, and nearly every other astronomer I know, have
switched to Macs as much as possible: minimal need to screw around for
hours just to get things working!)

I'll go crawl back in my hole with the other end-users for a while
now and be quiet again. :-)

- Marshall

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[Message index]

		Re: Linux Question By: Chris Lee on Wed, 16 February 2005 15:05
		Re: Linux Question By: David Fanning on Wed, 16 February 2005 14:55
		Re: Linux Question By: Michael Wallace on Wed, 16 February 2005 14:37
		Re: Linux Question By: David Fanning on Wed, 16 February 2005 14:21
		Re: Linux Question By: Paul Van Delst[1] on Wed, 16 February 2005 13:52
		Re: Linux Question By: Michael Wallace on Wed, 16 February 2005 13:30
		Re: Linux Question By: Jonathan Greenberg on Wed, 16 February 2005 13:31
		Re: Linux Question By: Jonathan Greenberg on Wed, 16 February 2005 13:30
		Re: Linux Question By: David Fanning on Wed, 16 February 2005 12:55
		Re: Linux Question By: Michael Wallace on Wed, 16 February 2005 12:19
		Re: Linux Question By: James Kuyper on Wed, 16 February 2005 12:00
		Re: Linux Question By: Chad Bender on Wed, 16 February 2005 11:43
		Re: Linux Question By: Benjamin Hornberger on Wed, 16 February 2005 11:37
		Re: Linux Question By: KM on Wed, 16 February 2005 11:07
		Re: Linux Question By: David Fanning on Wed, 16 February 2005 10:44
		Re: Linux Question By: James Kuyper on Wed, 16 February 2005 10:31
		Re: Linux Question By: Michael Wallace on Wed, 16 February 2005 10:27
		Re: Linux Question By: mperrin+news on Wed, 16 February 2005 19:50
		Re: Linux Question By: Jonathan Greenberg on Wed, 16 February 2005 15:35
		Re: Linux Question By: Paul Van Delst[1] on Wed, 16 February 2005 15:28
		Re: Linux Question By: David Fanning on Wed, 16 February 2005 15:14

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