"solar physics relies primarily on remote sensing from both space- and
ground-based observations"
-- This may sound a little off in the era of a heliosphere systems
approach and the arrival of PSP and SO.
"IDL (Interactive Data Language), a commercial and closed- source
programming language."
-- while this is of course true, I think it is important to note that
IDL was first developed in close collaboration with solar physicists
and initially had a significant impact on it's development. So it was
nice to have a language tailored to astrophysics needs, even though
the target audience changed significantly in recent years. Maybe add a
sentence like this after "The community extracted several benefits
from this transition" :
"IDL was initially developed in close collaboration with the solar
and astrophysics community, providing approaches tailored to many of
the analysis challenges of the time."
"Since then, significant and powerful functionality has been developed
for solar data analysis as part of Solarsoft, an open-source library
of integrated IDL software libraries that provide a common data
analysis environment?."
If we want to provide a proper historicalk perspective, I would say
something like:
"Starting with the Yohkoh mission, the solar physics community
embraced the nascent open-source, distributed software development
ideas through the SolarSoft package of data calibration and analysis
code, most of which was in IDL. This provided a shared data analysis
toolkit that allowed rapid dissemenation of algorithms and code
throughout the community."
From @kreardon
"solar physics relies primarily on remote sensing from both space- and ground-based observations" -- This may sound a little off in the era of a heliosphere systems approach and the arrival of PSP and SO.
"IDL (Interactive Data Language), a commercial and closed- source programming language." -- while this is of course true, I think it is important to note that IDL was first developed in close collaboration with solar physicists and initially had a significant impact on it's development. So it was nice to have a language tailored to astrophysics needs, even though the target audience changed significantly in recent years. Maybe add a sentence like this after "The community extracted several benefits from this transition" : "IDL was initially developed in close collaboration with the solar and astrophysics community, providing approaches tailored to many of the analysis challenges of the time."
"Since then, significant and powerful functionality has been developed for solar data analysis as part of Solarsoft, an open-source library of integrated IDL software libraries that provide a common data analysis environment?."
If we want to provide a proper historicalk perspective, I would say something like: "Starting with the Yohkoh mission, the solar physics community embraced the nascent open-source, distributed software development ideas through the SolarSoft package of data calibration and analysis code, most of which was in IDL. This provided a shared data analysis toolkit that allowed rapid dissemenation of algorithms and code throughout the community."