throwaway200610

NASA, like many large organizations known for prestigious accomplishments, can struggle to meet the needs of those doing more run-of-the-mill things (like internal HR apps as you mentioned). Especially in a place like the government, people's ego's feel small, and they try to compensate by making their projects bigger, grander, and overstated. This just results in bloat, too much talking, and BS as you mentioned.

I'm sorry you had that experience. If you ever consider coming back, I'd recommend getting involved with something more directly related to space applications.

I agree IDL is a poor tool. However, it is used widely across universities and research laboratories for space science and earths science and this is not problem exclusive to NASA. Yes, many people use Python, R, or Julia (we use Python in our lab at NASA) but there are people in science who get stuck in their old ways.

That said, this article reads like he's from a software engineering branch, not a science group.