| Re: Interesting article in Nature [message #83026 is a reply to message #83023] |
Thu, 31 January 2013 02:33   |
lecacheux.alain
Messages: 325
Registered: January 2008
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Senior Member |
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Le jeudi 31 janvier 2013 10:38:19 UTC+1, Fab a écrit :
> Hi Paulo,
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> Thanks for the link
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> By the way, in papers it is almost never mentioned in the
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> acknowledgements or so with which tool the graphics have been made. Is
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> IDL (i.e. exelis) for example officially requiring it's users to mention
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> IDL in their manuscripts?
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> Fab
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> On 01/31/2013 12:24 AM, Paulo Penteado wrote:
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>>
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>> It is not everyday that choosing IDL over other languages gets
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>> discussed in Nature:
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>> "The algorithms to be incorporated were varied, and included codes for
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>> estimating snow coverage, grain size and absorption of solar radiation
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>> by dust and black carbon. They had been written in IDL, a specialized
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>> programming language used by many researchers. Geographers, remote
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>> sensing experts and software programmers contributed.
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>> Most computer scientists would assume that such a system would take
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>> years, not weeks, to develop. The algorithms would presumably have to
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>> be rewritten in a standard language such as C++, Java or Python, or
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>> one that could run on a fast computer system or infrastructure, such
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>> as Google’s MapReduce model.
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>> But, in my experience, there is no need to rewrite scientific
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>> algorithms for bigdata systems. Rewriting only increases the barriers
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>> to communication between scientists and computer engineers. Rewriting
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>> can also introduce costly errors."
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>> From
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>> http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/493473a
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>>
Indeed an interesting paper.
The author, who is a scientist, express that the way in which science data are transformed by processing (by using IDL, Matlab, Python or any low level languages) becomes now less important that the way in which the resulting processed data can be archived, distributed or even merged together.
Sure that general and efficient ways for managing multi source data remain to be found (e.g. semantic web research). Nevertheless, regarding its future (and present!) scientific use, I feel important that IDL will be kept fully capable to access all sorts of existing or future shared data structures.
alain.
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