[Radiance-general] Research tools: who what which how?

[Greg Ward]

Hi Chris,

I have the same issue with passing familiarity with too many languages.  Despite having written a whole GUI in Tcl/Tk, I have a horrible time understanding even what I've written in the language.  In contrast, even the most obfuscated bit of code in C seems easy enough to follow.

Perl is somewhere in-between for me.  It's a bit ugly, but similar enough to C for me to follow along without having to struggle too much.  I can't say the same for Python or even C++, mostly because I never really got comfortable with the object-oriented approach, despite having spent more than half my programming career employing it.  I'm definitely one of those reluctant adopters, where most of my C++ code follows a strong procedural bent.

I agree with what you said earlier about the advantage of scripting is that you can go freely between command-line and batch file.  It makes the evolution from running a few commands until you get it right to putting what you need in a script so much easier.  Unfortunately, there isn't one command interpreter that works cross-platform, which is why we have the issue with too many C-shell utilities in Radiance.

-Greg

> From: Christopher Rush <Christopher.Rush at arup.com>
> Subject: Re: [Radiance-general] Research tools: who what which how?
> Date: April 18, 2016 3:16:39 PM PDT
> 
> I had recently been assuming python would become our go-to for data manipulation based on popularity, but I'm learning that shouldn't be my assumption within the Radiance community - which I bet was Randolph's original intent in this thread.
> 
> Maybe I'll attempt Ruby for the next solution I need to sort out.
> 
> For me personally, I'll probably never really "learn" any of these, I'll just Google search snippets to cobble together whatever I need - but only when bash can't do it well and the internet can present a better solution   : )    I suppose I could say I've "learned" bash because I've examined enough snippets and written enough from scratch for multiple years, but unless I attempted to abandon bash and tried to do all of my six-scripts-per-year in python/ruby/etc I'll remain a newbie in each one.
> 
> Sorry - didn't mean to hijack the thread - just throwing in an extra perspective. I don't really need any specific guidance at the moment.
> 
> -Chris