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From: arxt@tank.uchicago.edu (patrick  palmer)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Why no plotting packages?
Keywords: plot, computation, Paintjet
Message-ID: <5992@tank.uchicago.edu>
Date: 26 Oct 89 05:00:10 GMT
Sender: arxt@tank.uchicago.edu
Reply-To: arxt@tank.uchicago.edu (patrick  palmer)
Organization: University of Chicago
Lines: 42


I think it is time to grumble again about the lack of a scientific
plotting package for the Amiga.  Anyone who does numerical
calculations would find it very helpful to be able to plot columns of
of numbers against each other.  I do this frequently on a Sun
workstation, and we ought to be able to do it on an our Amigas.
Let alone getting final results, it speeds up debugging enormously to
be able to write out a file of columns of numbers, plot any column
against any other column on the screen, fiddle with the plot
parameters, change to one column against the log of another, etc., and
if you want to, print out the plot for your notebook.

I have a decent A2000 system, an HP Paintjet printer, but I cannot do
the above described analysis.  There is a program called supermongo -
whose source is in C - which a friend (who is a very good programmer)
estimates would take 3 months of his spare time to port to the Amiga.
I would certainly pay $100 - $200 for a version of supermongo that
could print on my Paintjet (drivers are hopelessly beyond my
programming capabilities).  How many people like me are necessary to
make it worth someone's while to do this?  100 sales would amount to
$10,000 to $20,000, so if half goes to "overhead" someone could make
$5000 to $10000 for 3 months of spare time work.  There must be at
least that many people out here who would pay.  100 sales is only one
per 10000 Amigas now.  (I do not care whether or not it is an actual
port of supermongo, there are a number of packages of similar
functionality - I am not even clear on the copyright status.)

Another issue is the effect on sales of accelerators and programming
tools for Amigas were such a plotting package available.  I have tried
a number of plotting packages that are available, and they help, but
they do not do everything I want for rapid inspection of results or
for making nice copies.  For people like me, it is pretty dumb to
compute things I have to upload to a Sun at work to look at.  But, if
I could be selfcontained at home, the picture would be very different.

Beyond my own interests, it seems clear that the existence of such packages
is necessary before several classes of potential users will take the Amiga
seriously.  As a TeX workstation, Amigas certainly shine.  But if they
cannot do any of the other tasks that workstations are often used for, the
chance for expanding the market into new areas is limited.

Pat Palmer (email: ppalmer@oddjob.uchicago.edu)