RE: [Fwd: Re: Wikipedia criticism about root]

Hi,

Interesting to see that some people have quite some time to go into this kind of endless discussion.
It is like the war between Fortran, C/C++, C#, Java... or between Linux, Windows, and MacOS.
Everyone has its own taste, its own point of view. So what ? Coming from industry, I can tell that you should be happy to be able (more or less) to do your job (I mean physics) with software designed for it. By experience, I can say that it is not always (well, almost never) the case...
I spent quite a few years fighting to justify software implementation choices with people who don't know the difference between Visual Basic and C++, and I'm quite disappointed to see this kind of sterile polemic here :-(
Just my humble (and personal) opinion.

Cheers,
Bertrand.

P.S. I will not enter this discussion, but I really had to comment on it.

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-roottalk_at_pcroot.cern.ch
[mailto:owner-roottalk_at_pcroot.cern.ch] On Behalf Of Andy Buckley Sent: Thursday, June 29, 2006 11:58 PM
To: Julius Hrivnac
Cc: cstrato; roottalk (Mailing list discussing all aspects of the ROOT system)
Subject: Re: [Fwd: Re: [ROOT] Wikipedia criticism about root]

Julius Hrivnac wrote:

>> PS. Myself and cstrato seem to have assumed the twin roles of Chief
>> Arguer here. I think it would be of benefit if others --- including
>> some of those who've mailed me personally with supportive messages
>> and the main ROOT developers, who presumably (I hope!) have opinions
>> on these issues --- can add to the debate. Otherwise this whole
>> affair is a waste of words... a fact which I suspect is not lost on
>> the more prominent silent parties ;-)

> 
> Many people have spend already a lot of time in arguments about Root 
> problems. I certainly did, Guy Barrand did, FreeHEP team did,...
> People working in LHC experiments (as I do) are very well aware of 
> serious Root problems, but:
> - don't have time to discuss them because they have to fix them
> - are discouraged by the fact that no serious discussion about Root
>   alternatives is allowed in LCG/AA (CERN official LHC software 
> project)

Thanks for the comments. This explanation is entirely in keeping with my understanding of the situation. Does anyone else have any comments on this?

I'm glad that bug fixes are being fed back into ROOT rather than fixed "locally" on a per-user or per-experiment basis. At least I hope that's what's happening! :) There are certain "bugs", however, like the class design, UI etc. that cannot be fixed by outside parties: those will require a design and development effort, at least by the core team who (by definition) do have the time to work on it.

Andy Received on Fri Jun 30 2006 - 08:59:58 MEST