There is an official VSCode extension for IDL! NV5 Geospatial mentions it in a blog post:

TLDR: We have an official extension for Visual Studio Code called IDL for VSCode! It is open source on GitHub, you can see some of the features we have planned, and there’s a place to ask questions and provide feedback. See below for a story about our journey to get here, our inspiration for the user experience, and our goals for community engagement.

The extension seems fairly useful. It’s more than just a syntax highlighter. It can give linting-type information: finding syntax errors, give recommendations (for example, you are missing a compile_opt statement), warnings like unused variables, etc. And, of course, everyone’s favorite editor feature — auto-completion.

There is a, so far, quiet, GitHub Discussion for discussing the extension.

The Datawrapper blog has been publishing some data visualization posts. This article gives a an overview of ways to make your legend colors more accessible to viewers:

You designed a useful (and fun!) color key for your data visualization to explain to your readers what your colors mean? Great! Now you’ll want to make sure people don’t forget those associations between colors and categories. This article explores a few ways to do so:

1. Keep your color key always close by
2. Reuse your colors in annotations
3. Make your color key interactive
4. Reuse your colors in tooltips
5. Reuse your colors in text around your visualization

IDL 8.9 was released several months ago, but I didn’t write about it at the time. Here are the release notes and there is a nice overview on YouTube as well. Here are my impressions on what I am personally excited to use.

New features

New licensing mechanism

Hopefully better than the last licensing scheme.

Advanced Scientific Data Format (ASDF) support

This could be useful for me. DKIST is using ASDF to provide a hierarchical listing of all the files in a dataset:

The ASDF file is provided alongside the Dataset to facilitate inspection and analysis of the metadata of a Dataset, without having to transfer all the data. This, in concert with the preview movie, is designed to help make decisions on if a given Dataset is of interest, or what parts of it are, without needing to transfer it.

See ADSF on GitHub.

Use i and j to create complex valued constants

Like:

IDL> help, 1 + 2i
<Expression>    COMPLEX   = (      1.00000,      2.00000)

I don’t need this, but it seems like a handy notation. I wonder how many odd bugs will be created with trying to increment a counter i and accidentally creating a complex variable?

Binary, octal, and hexadecimal constants

Creating binary, octal, and hexadecimal constants with 0b, 0o, and 0x prefixes, i.e., color = 0xff0000 also seems handy. I have a use for the binary constants with creating bitmasks. I create hex constants regularly, so maybe I will use that notation now.

Gabor transform filter

This looks interesting, but I don’t have definite plans for it now.

Template literal strings

I am probably most excited about template literal strings, string like Python f-strings that insert the values of variables into themselves. I tend to do things like the following a lot:

filename = string(date, wave_region, format='%s.ucomp.%s.intensity.mp4')

Now I can do it like this:

filename = `${date}.ucomp.${wave_region}.intensity.mp4`

I find this much easier to read and less error-prone. You can also embed C or Fortran-style format codes as well. Very nice!

New compile_opt options

There are new compile_opt options: float64 makes doubles the default floating point value, and idl3 which is shorthand for defint32, float64, logical_predicate, and strictarr. I tend to use just strictarr.

YAML Ain’t Markup Language (YAML) support

Here’s another one that I think I might end up using a lot. I don’t have a specific need for it right now, but it is another option now for configuration file data.

Updates

• JSON_SERIALIZE PRETTY keyword — I have to serialize JSON output quite a bit and a better printed output would be very useful. It can be difficult to look at strings like:

IDL> print, json
{"sep_forecast_submission":{"model":{"short_name":"MLSO K-Cor","spase_id":"spas
e://NSF/Catalog/MLSO/K-Cor/AutomatedEventList"},"issue_time":"2021-06-28T13:47:
00Z","mode":"realtime","triggers":[{"cme":{"start_time":"2021-06-28T19:28:12Z",
"pa":315,"speed":320.23999,"time_at_height":{"height":1.26,"time":"2021-06-28T1
9:28:12Z"},"catalog":"MLSO_KCOR"}}],"inputs":[{"coronagraph":{"observatory":"ML
SO","instrument":"K-Cor","products":[{"product":"White Light","last_data_time":
"2021-06-28T13:46Z"}]}}],"observations":[{"all_clear":{"all_clear_boolean":fals
e,"all_clear_type":"cme"},"alert":{"alert_type":"ALERT","start_time":"2021-06-2
8T13:47:00Z"}}]}}

This is much easier to read:

IDL> print, json_serialize(json_parse(json), /pretty)
{
    "sep_forecast_submission": {
        "model": {
            "short_name": "MLSO K-Cor",
            "spase_id": "spase://NSF/Catalog/MLSO/K-Cor/AutomatedEventList"
        },
        "issue_time": "2021-06-28T13:47:00Z",
        "mode": "realtime",
...

Libraries

• Keeping up with library updates is a good sign.
• Dropped support for 32-bit and Python Bridge support for Python 3.7. I don’t have old systems that need these, so I am fine with them leaving. You have to cut off old stuff eventually, otherwise new work becomes too difficult.

IDL 8.8.1 was recently released. Some new features and improvements:

• performance improvements by converting some .pro code to C including the List, Hash, and Dictionary classes
• improved JSON_PARSE speed
• many updated libraries, including support for Python 3.70.10, 3.8.10, and 3.9.5
• support for Mac M1 chip

For more details, see the IDL 8.8.1 Release Notes.

I am fascinated by this ASCII art drawing application:

Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay. Monodraw allows you to easily create text-based art (like diagrams, layouts, flow charts) and visually represent algorithms, data structures, binary formats and more. Because it’s all just text, it can be easily embedded almost anywhere. Of course, exporting as images is also supported (PNG and SVG).