On Mar 24, 2008, at 3:14 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Date: Tue, 25 Mar 2008 00:01:37 +0600
From: Ivan Shmakov <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: [GRASS-dev] Re: GRASS & programming
To: [email protected]
Cc: Ivan Shmakov <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
One could wax philosophical on this topic for a long time. And in
enjoying the various perspectives on this topic, I digressed from my
original intended comments.
My perspective is that the goal of the GRASS project is not to teach
or even try to encourage users to gain programming skills. The goal is
not to discourage programming either. The goal of this project is to
provide a set of powerful tools for geospatial analysis and
presentation, and to make these as accessible as possible to potential
users.
One way to control this software is through typing commands, which can
be chained into sequences--using any of a wide array of programming/
scripting languages--to automate geospatial analysis and presentation.
Another way to control it is to use a GUI interface.
The fact that a great many more people have learned how to control
software using a GUI interface in the past couple decades than have
learned to do it via a programming language, strongly suggests that it
may be a good way to make geospatial software tools accessible to a
wide user audience. On the other hand, programming (whether by typing
commands or by some other syntax) is very useful and can accomplish
tasks that are simply not practically possible any other way.
So I'm committed to making sure that we have a variety of means
available for potential users to access and control the software we
are developing. I don't really care whether a user uses the GUI or
learns to program in order to chain GRASS commands. I do care that
both methods are richly available and easy to access for users who
need them--and hope that we also remain open to other, yet undeveloped
means of controlling GRASS.
Cheers
Michael
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