Re: Top 10 for old farts

["Luis Alonso" <luis.alonso(at)uv.es>]

"Mark Hadfield" <m.hadfield@niwa.cri.nz> wrote in message
964994988.21151@clam-ext">news:964994988.21151@clam-ext...
> "Joseph B. Gurman" <gurman@gsfc.nasa.gov> wrote in message
> news:gurman-FF65F5.09515928072000@news.gsfc.nasa.gov...
> >     I guess you've seen the responses from Mark Hadfield and Luis Alonso
> > on the overhead involved in using objects.
>
> Speaking only for myself (not Luis) I should elaborate.

Hi, now is my turn to express myself (after digesting the huge amount of
submissions to the newsgroup).

I think after all this discussion it's pretty much clear that objects (and
not only O.G.) are a must in IDL, in the same way that the most classical
way of programing (included direct graphics).

As I said previosly, i've playing around with object graphics, but not been
able to do much by myself, so i kept using D.G. for those 'i need them for
yesterday' plots, but for interactivity O.G. were a must, you know the kind
of 'spin me this 5000 facets 3D modell around while zooming in and out, and
change the colours cause those don't look the way i like' stuff.

Today i've spent a whole afternoon (from 3pm to 21:30pm, -yes, i'm a late
nite thinker not as David-) just to build a widget to select n-choices from
a list... geez, that IDL handbook is cryptic indeed (japanese if far easier
to understand), and although it works i'm pretty sure it could be far easier
implemented. And at the very end it shows that it wasn't that much
difficult, but it was a pain trying to figure out the way widgets work from
the lousy examples... (no use trying to read the text: nowhere is explained
what 'pro widget2_event, ev' is and even less what that ev structure is and
means. The example shows how to build a list, but is never shown how to
retrieve the values chosen from that list -that's what took me most of the
time-).

And to call it a day, a college just happend to ask me to give her a quick
and dirty explanation of what an object is...

All of this just says one thing: Objects are easy to use once you know how.
Objects are useful. All we need is to learn how to use them and that's
difficult by now.

So I hope RSI provides with the next release with an 'IDL Objects for old
farts dumb scientists'.

In any case, I support that proposal for Pavel and 'Now, what's an object
again?' Ben to contribute to David's -never in the library's shelf- book.

And now i better hurry home... otherwhise i'd spend the night at the lab.

Good night, and 'don't let the OG bugs bite you'

                Luis Alonso

PD: is that the right expression 'good night and don't let the bed bugs bite
you'? My english's expressions are not in shape... i keep on shuffling the
words :\