[GRASS-user] GIS software popularity ranking: http://gisgeography.com/mapping-out-gis-software-landscape

[Rich Shepard]

On Tue, 27 Sep 2016, Dave Roberts wrote:

> Sadly, it's not just Microsoft users that take the GUI view.  A couple of
> years ago GRASS was reviewed in Linux Journal and they didn't even mention
> it was scriptable. I wrote a letter to the editor to point that out and
> they responded that that was minimally interesting.

Dave,

   I think this makes sense in the context in which desktop GIS developed. It
was developed and marketed as mapping software. It could be used to answer
two main questions: what is where? And, where is what? I'm thinking of
MapInfo in the early 1990s where one could do simple vector overlays but the
emphasis was on producing pretty maps. This was different from the
PC-ARC/Info I used for a year or so in the late 1980s (I was a beta tester
for them) and certainly from GRASS (which I started using in the
mid-1990s.).

   Think of the rise of desktop publishing in the mid- to late-1980s.
Suddenly, everyone became a graphic designer (in their own minds, at least)
and produced many ugly fliers and documents. This is similar to the
difference between GIS as a computerized map creation tool and as spatial
analysis tool.

   Germane to the various GIS software reviews and rankings allow me to
suggest that we ignore them. Those who matter don't mind that GRASS is
poo-poo'd for using such complexities as the console and scripts, and those
who mind don't matter because they wouldn't use GRASS anyway.

Rich