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From: | Marcus D. Leech |
Subject: | [Discuss-gnuradio] Gnu Radio architecture, etc |
Date: | Fri, 30 Dec 2011 15:45:12 -0500 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.2.24) Gecko/20111108 Fedora/3.1.16-1.fc14 Thunderbird/3.1.16 |
Very true, all of it, GNUradio is quite the hodgepodge of different APIs, Languages, and Ideas. And that's not always a bad thing, it can allow great flexibility, but sadly it is currently doing the opposite. With required versions of SWIG, Python 2.x/3.x and other helper programs it ONLY compiles reliably on ubuntu and fedora, and only Ubuntu, not kubuntu or Xubuntu as the small differences in GTK versions break most of wxgui. I am also a die-hard FreeBSD user forced into Ubuntu as no other operating system can compile GNUradio since 3.2. OK sorry for the rant.
See my earlier rant about "shoulders of giants".I think that what happens for *some* people is that Gnu Radio isn't written using their programming language/paradigm of choice. To *them* it's "obvious it should have been written in {C,C++,Ruby,Java,Fortran,Pascal,Erlang,Cobol} and I can't understand why these Gnu Radio idiots picked Python/C++". I admit that back in 2005, when I first started using Gnu Radio, I was resentful of the choice of Python/C++. Two languages that I was ill-prepared for. I spend most of my professional life coding in C, with occasional excursions into C++. Gnu Radio forced me to learn enough Python to get by. Now, I love it. I find that I'm much more likely to write a "throw away" program in Python than C these days, and I've been a C programmer since 1979! I taught my son Python when he was 8. He still loves it at nearly-14, and even taught Python to his class-mates when he was at a private school.
With the advent of GRC, you don't even have to know Python or C++ to accomplish a great deal of stuff. If the "plugging lego together" paradigm isn't "natural" or is too restricting, you can always program in a soup of Python and C++. It's all doable.
-- Marcus Leech Principal Investigator Shirleys Bay Radio Astronomy Consortium http://www.sbrac.org
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