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copied!<p>I had similar thoughts when I started learning IDL -- and I'm still not a fan of it, but I now have some code out there in the wild that I support in SolarSoft (a software distribution system for solar physics ... and most of the software's in IDL).</p> <p>IDL's good at processing large data cubes and digital images, and it's fairly easy to learn if you know Fortran. (which most of the older scientists do, and I had to take in college as an engineering student who wasn't CompE)</p> <p>The thing is -- there's a LOT of code out there in IDL. The cost of converting it all to some other language, and giving it the necessary testing is just astronomical. My boss's estimate is that it'd take over a dozen man years, and we'd need people who understood IDL, whatever new language, and the actual science so they understood why the logic of the code is there (and not just some oddity of the language). ... and then you have to consider retraining all of the scientists. At our current funding level, that's just not going to happen. </p> <p>All of that being said, I'd <em>love</em> for their Regex engine to use PCRE or at least supported zero-width assertions. They've finally made it so I can pass a string into the XML parser without having to write it to a file first, but I'm still waiting for real SOAP support, and not my hack attempts at it. I have to work around restrictions like no zero-element arrays (I use pointers to arrays, so I can leave a null pointer), namespaces (I fake it with objects) and lack of XPath support (I've seen some odd problems when after walking DOM tree, the cleanup time quadruples for every doubling of elements in the tree ... I've had to return large recordsets as tax delim, rather than XML, but hope to test if their VOTable implementation has the same issues)</p> <p>At this point, I'm not suggesting that people stop using IDL -- but I <em>am</em> campaigning to get people to stop storing and distributing their data catalogs as IDL save files, due to the restriction on reading them with anything other than IDL. And I know of a few efforts to make services for scientists to run their data prep, so that hopefully they can get away from requiring scientists to have IDL to be able to use the data.</p>

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