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

Federico Carminati wrote:
> I would like to point out that they have only two alternative explanations
> to the present situation. Either they are more clever than us all, but
> so much more that we did not even understand what they were saying, or
> they have been silenced. The second explanation may be reassuring for them,
> but is false ...

Well, I've mentioned several cases where other solutions have been silenced, often in a quite arrogant way. Alternative presentations are not allowed, and people have been even forced to remove their software from the repository because it didn't follow "the official party line". [And the fact that Root itself has suffered from that treatment before doesn't justify it !]

So why were Root sirens so successful ? I see several reasons for that: 1) Root does everything just well enough. For almost all components, there

    is a better alternative (OpenInventor for 3D, Qt for GUI, HDF5 for     files, Doxygen for documentation, almost all AIDA implementations     for histograms,...), but there is no other place where all those things     are ready-to-be-used in one package.     [This is, however, very frustrating for some developers, who     provide better alternatives and can't get them accepted because they     "don't work well with Root" - for reasons technical or political.]     After the collapse of LHC++, users were happy with just any tool which     at least worked - what difference it made to have it. And Root was     certainly best placed to satisfy that. 2) Root is easy to install and works everywhere. User just downloads a tar file

    (actually not so big), untars it and it runs. With most other HEP packages,     a user should go through a calvaric process of downloading gigabytes of     stuff (and you never know what exactly you have to get), learning     obscure management systems, setting up all environment variables     and configuration files, ..., to finally find out that she has a bad     luck because she is using a slightly different version of GCC     or Linux kernel.
3) Root is easy to use (as long as you don't want to do funny

    C++ tricks). Ideal for a beginner (so for most of us). Less useful,     however, if you want to use real OO with Abstract Interfaces,... or     advanced C++ techniques. Using third-party packages is often a problem too     (but you don't need them in Root, do you ? :-). 4) Root offers known look&feel - that of PAW - with bigger functionality.

    So the migration is (was) easy.
5) Root user support is (was) excellent. The answer to any bug report /

    feature request usually came within minutes, the fix/implementation     within hours. With all other packages, user has to wait sometimes week     even to get any response at all.

[Just note that technical points - i.e. 1,2,3 - are satisfied by Java much better. Which is certainly not surprising as Root is in many respects just a naive reimplementation of Java (Java itself is implemented is C++).]

                           Julius

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