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copied!<p>I've been using IDL for 8 years in a medical imaging research laboratory. I also use MATLAB, LabVIEW and Visual C++. </p> <p>IDL Cost: It's true that programming terminals need IDL licenses. However, you can run your IDL applications under their free "Virtual Machine" on any terminal if you can put up with a splash screen. Also, a lot of other languages/development environments cost as much as IDL (if you use them legally). Visual Studio is more expensive at this university per license than IDL. </p> <p>IDL/MATLAB vs Visual C++/etc: You can write a program or GUI application in a day in IDL that would take a week to write in C++/Visual C++ -- that's a quote from our expert Visual C++ programmer. IDL only takes two weeks to learn, and there is an excellent book to learn from. Of course the C++ program will run faster and you will have more controls to play with if you add a Visual GUI. However, if you want to prototype an algorithm or an application with a user interface to analyze data, IDL (or MATLAB) will save you a lot of time. </p> <p>IDL vs MATLAB: IDL is a little more verbose than MATLAB, and does not have the user base or the number of toolboxes, but the main user forum it does have is excellent, with a number of responsive experts. It used to be that the IDL GUI programming interface was superior, although MATLAB may have caught up -- I'm still much more comfortable programming IDL "widgets." Also, IDL's built-in functions sometimes seem to have a little more "built-in," which may make up for its smaller user base. A good example is the convolve command: "convol" in IDL vs "conv" in MATLAB. The command is a longer word in IDL, but there are also included flags for normalizing the result, as well as for dealing with invalid data and edge effects. MATLAB syntax is more elegant and concise, and it's nice to be able to directly return more than one value from a function.</p> <p>Trust me: learning "scientific data" languages like IDL and MATLAB is worthwhile if you want to spend more time working with data than working with code. I'm not going to say one is better than the other, but languages like this can be indispensible in the lab, especially an imaging lab.</p>

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