You'd only be looking at this because you already know you need to use IDL and want an open-source implementation. Unless you have a hard requirement to use it

You'd only be looking at this because you already know you need to use IDL and want an open-source implementation. Unless you have a hard requirement to use it (like your data is in an IDL data format, or you rely on IDL libraries) there is no reason you would choose to over R, Python, or Julia.