Re:A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)
by dfalzone on Friday September 04, 2020 @05:31PM
(#24379079)
Funny, today one of my coworkers was talking about how she used IDL at one of her previous jobs, and later I happened to see this comment. Neat coincidence :)
Re:A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)
by codezero on Friday September 04, 2020 @11:14PM
(#24381135)
I think there is a bias for that, but I always love hearing of others who’ve used IDL. You should ask her if she knows of the coyote guide to IDL - I lived by it around 2008. Not sure if it was niche to my field or more general, or if it wasn’t a great resource before or after it was great for me :)
I worked in astrophysics for a while, and maintained a large codebase that included a ton of Fortran, and had a lot of references to Vax VMS systems within the comments as that's what the team I worked with used mostly through the 80s and early 90s before moving to Linux.
One of the things that didn't seem to happen was C - there was some code here and there (I wrote a module for IDL - IDL is a proprietary scripting language that mimics and interoperates with Fortran in a lot of ways). Fortran was able to stick around because of a lot of work on great compilers, and I think, in general, the great speed up of commercial hardware has made the need for hyper optimization less necessary for a lot of day-to-day physics study.