Re: Top 10 for old farts

[Pavel Romashkin <promashkin(at)cmdl.noaa.gov>]

Paul van Delst wrote:
> Throwing
> money and people at a problem when things get tight - sheesh. Is this
> still an accepted mode of operation at software houses 

I wish I could join Paul in sighing about inacceptability of this
policy, but here on Earth this is how it is done (if the result is
needed), not only in software companies. Well, not at NOAA of course,
but by other establishments that have money :-(

> Ahhhhh. When IDL v5 was released, the first thing I did was convert some
> of my code to use OG. My god was it slow. Also, when I started up
> Insight I figured that it had to be the showcase of what IDL OG had to
> offer. That all pretty much turned me off OG - and thus IDL objects - in
> general. The latter was a bad decision I know, but my "to-do" list kept
> getting bigger during the 2-week period I spent playing with IDL OG.

I am not arguing about IDLgr* speed with Paul, or, God forbid, David,
but I find that with today's computers even object graphics is not that
slow. I don't use multitudes of graphic objects, but rendering a few
line plots with zoom, point selection, deletion, calculation, adding and
removing temporary grPlots, etc. - I notice so little difference
compared with direct graphics that it is not detrimental to the
application. I think that once faster machines become more widespread,
3D object graphics will find more use. On a Pentium 60 w/o OpenGL, I
agree, it is intolerable.

Cheers,
Pavel