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Wow what a throwback. I used IDL when I worked in astrophysics, and I loved it. It had a lot of fun capabilities and was super easy to build C libraries for. B
by codezero 5y ago
Wow what a throwback. I used IDL when I worked in astrophysics, and I loved it. It had a lot of fun capabilities and was super easy to build C libraries for.
Back then there was also an attempt at making GDL (gnu data language), but the tooling for IDL was so deep I doubt anything can directly replace it. Then again I've been out of this for twelve years.
- wumpus 5y agoI just got back into astrophysics after having been gone for 25 years, and no one uses IDL anymore.
- codezero 5y agoI’d love to know what it looks like now. I knew a few folks doing a lot of GPU work, but so many old folks still making charts and figures in IDL, myself included.
- wumpus 5y agoIt's mostly Python most of the time, from my vantage point. Several of the GPU projects I'm watching have GPU kernels contained inside of python frameworks. So the typical user only has to change the python part of the code.
- codezero 5y agoHah, that's fantastic. This reminds me of a talk I attended about how most of science/academia has a lot of fast-moving glue to stitch together all the old/hard bits. https://www.easterbrook.ca/steve/2010/12/agu-session-on-software-engineering-for-climate-modeling/ https://www.easterbrook.ca/steve/2010/12/agu-session-on-soft...