Re: Top 10 for old farts

["Pete Riley" <uk2(at)linuxfan.com>]

Joseph B. Gurman in a flash of brilliance said:

>     The real beauty of IDL for scientists is _not_ its ability to do
> everything in the most elegant way possible, but in its capability to do
> 90% of what we want _very fast_ and to do more elegant things on a
> time-invested basis (e.g. really pretty plots; 3D shaded, rotating
> surfaces; the ability to save such projections as objects).

Joe:
I agree 101%. But, I think the larger picture here though is that RSI missed
the "object" boat. When "Tek" terminals were in vogue, direct graphics were
perfectly adequate. But since the early 90's, graphics packages that
*really* use object concepts have performed basic graphing tasks much better
than anything in IDL. I'm constantly amazed by the number of Mac users
(scientists) still propagating their copy of Kaleidagraph to their next
powermac. I can't blame them though; Insight doesn't come close to mimicking
the capabilities of a > 10 year old program. RSI is struggling with the
object paradigm shift. I believe it was a mistake to introduce the object
graphics so early and, at the same time, maintain the direct graphics. Why
not replace all the direct graphics calls with object equivalents? You
should be able to say:

PLOT, findgen(10)

and you get an object window (maybe plus the print, modify,etc...options
that are in insight). There should have been a transparent migration to
object graphics. I can appreciate that there are technical difficulties. But
as an end user, they shouldn't affect ME.

-Pete Riley