Talk:ROOT

message: I'm highly disappointed to see the list of accurate, significant, and relavent criticisms where removed from the page, and replaced with a few sentences, essencially stating "Some people don't like ROOT", which is a gross mischaracterzation.  Not only does the reek of favortism (as I'm sure some ROOT dev/associate was involved), it's contrary to fact.  And it doesn't help matters that I have to time to write this b/c at this moment ROOT is making my work impossible to complete.  I will resume a -detailed- expansion of the criticism section soon.
"Others would argue that these are design choices that make it a highly portable, self contained system that provides a comprehensive environment for data storage, analysis and data presentation."  The 'Others' refered to here, besides not being referenced or sited, are definatly NOT computer scientists.Duluoz
I see that rather than offer any serious rebuttal to the widely recognized criticisms or ROOT, it has just been effectively removed.
This is the standard "you can object, so long as you aren't given any time to offer a serious explanation of your objections" technique.
I think the phrase "to more immediate problems of data analysis" really shows the whole problem.  This opinion would be fine, HEP has a long history of writing code that just "gets the job done." but ROOT was marketed as an introduction to object-oriented code.  It has turned out to be a very poor introduction indeed, and has created a generation of programmers who think they understand OO but really just understand OO syntax (not even that if they use CINT!)  This results in code which is the worst of all worlds:  old-fashioned spaghetti code combined with all the extra overhead of pretending to be OO.  Fortunately all the extra work ROOT has made for the community will undoubtably lead to more HEP jobs!
Also the whole paragraph arguing that "criticisms are rare" has got to go.  If the ROOT developers are writing this, perhaps they should consider that they have a biased sample of user feedback, given that they are, you know, ROOT developers.  In my experience, many people who use ROOT at least have vague feelings that it is making their life more difficult then it rightly should.  Nearly everyone I know that writes code that other people use feel even more strongly that ROOTs poor design leads to productivity losses.  I grant that it is less frequent that someone levels the criticism as succintly and accurately as Andy.
--Savehep 11:46, 14 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The criticisms need to be removed unless a third-party source can be found. Citing the mailing lists, a primary source, violates no original research. Find some published ROOT bashing or the entire section must go since there is no verification. --Beefyt 02:45, 1 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: If you put it this way, then the whole article is for deletion, for the very same reasons. As far as I know, there is only one published journal article on ROOT, and it's from the authors, so the critics may as well consider it POV.  You cannot apply two different standards in the same place...  and personally I believe that deleting the article would be a disservice, because ROOT is notable. On the other side, the criticism section now is full of weasel words, and not well written in general, and I believe it should be rewritten. --Sergio Ballestrero 06:53, 1 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Isn't a lot of this material from ROOT's website? I think we can judge root.cern.ch to be a verifiable and neutral source on the features of ROOT. The website is not the primary source, the program is the primary source. Applying the same rule, if you want to report about the criticisms, then you can't use the criticisms themselves, you need another source. Your suggestion, while persuasive, assumes that the material in this article was obtained by examination of ROOT itself. --Beefyt 21:49, 1 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, given that there are clearly people contributing to this talk forum who believe that these criticisms are more substantial than just rumour. So if we're to consider the ROOT website as definitive and neutral (haha!), then would placing these criticisms on another web page count, too? Assuming that's the case, I've added a reference to my criticisms website, which has been on the web and known to the ROOT developers for about 4 years. If that doesn't count, what does? The text only mentions that ROOT has been criticised for these things: links to the mailing list and my page certainly verify that criticism has taken place. If anyone can suggest a way of publishing these criticisms in a way which would be "more acceptable", then please tell us how. Would writing the criticisms in LaTeX make them more "official"? :-) AndyBuckley 13:39, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Honestly I don't know what WP's standard is for 'criticism' sections, but my instinct here tells me that AndyBuckley's site doesn't qualify as a source because it is neither verifiable nor neutral. Whether non-scholarly criticisms even belong in this article, I don't have the expertise to say, but I agree that "ROOT has been criticised" is worthy of inclusion. The specifics, however, by definition violate WP:NPOV, since their mention is sponsored solely those with POV (AndyBuckley included). If any editors free of POV care to include the specific criticisms, please speak up, otherwise I move that the section be eliminated or summed up with the sentence, "Despite its features, ROOT is often criticised as difficult to use," or some such. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a catalog of your opinions. --Beefyt 05:36, 4 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I think the discussion, both here and elsewhere, indicates that there's more involved here than my personal opinions. For an example of other software criticism, see Criticism of Java, in which most criticisms are unreferenced, because they are factual. I think it would be fair to re-write the ROOT criticism in this style. Wikipedia isn't a catalog of opinions, but where there's been significant criticism it's fair to acknowledge that criticism has taken place (ROOTtalk links, critical web pages) and to enumerate the issues of complaint. AndyBuckley 14:53, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Removal of Criticism

message: More generic than STL?  Was this meant as a joke?  Or just to make our heads explode?  --Savehep 20:51, 19 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Application of ROOT

message: As a physics undergrad trying to learn how to use ROOT, it would be helpful for information on the different formats (such as TopNtuple) to be listed here.  A google search hasn't turned up much, and since I'm just learning it I won't write it, but perhaps a ROOT expert could give some insight.
:I've never heard of TopNtuple. From a Google search it looks like that's an ATLAS-specific term (correct me if I'm wrong). I don't think it is germane to this article. Josh Thompson 23:51, 22 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: ROOT Formats

message: Apparently, some reasonable points of criticism has been removed by this edit. Could anyone with good English restate it and take back to the article? Several references (maillist threads and articles) have been given above. I'm just a curious Wikipedia reader who wants to read a complete and neutral article about ROOT. 81.5.68.2 (talk) 11:10, 16 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Again about removed criticism 

message: The criticisms section was (again?) removed by this edit. I agree with this edit, since the criticisms did not reference reliable sources, and at worst the sources referenced the article itself. If another edit would like to revert this edit, please add a comment to the effect of "Do not remove this section under penalty of catapult," so this doesn't happen again. --Beefyt (talk) 21:30, 7 July 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: The criticism section is really poorly written right now. The line "In documentation marked "read this first", the user is mostly told things like "the backbone of the ROOT architecture is a layered class hierarchy"." particularly stands out. I think that in order to learn ROOT that is the first thing that somebody needs to know. Once you understand the way ROOT is organized you can learn a ton from reading the class references. If you're going to criticize root then there are probably bigger fish to fry than this. The wording for the section in general is awkward as well. --Anonymous (talk) 11:30, 28 March 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree. The section seems way to focused on the concept of "this is too complicated for people who don't understand it" without citing any source except the documentation itself (Does this qualify as original research?). "the backbone of the ROOT architecture is a layered class hierarchy" is referred to entirely without context- it's on the "Architectural Overview" page, intended for someone new to Root but NOT to OO. Malahci (talk) 15:06, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

text: I removed what was left of the criticism section, as it explained only one (poorly expressed) criticism, and only briefly mentioned others. All of the references point either to Andy Buckley's website or to archives of his emails on the ROOT users talk page- this is hardly enough to include an entire section. Malahci (talk) 15:28, 23 July 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Criticisms Removed 

message: It's June 2015, version 6 is out, CINT replaced by cling, what criticisms are still valid? Please kick the new version around. GangofOne (talk) 03:36, 13 June 2015 (UTC)
thread_title: Version 6

message: Hi,
The statement that IceCube uses ROOT is not really true.  Early versions of the IceCube simulation and analysis software did use ROOT, but we moved away from it in IceTray (our analysis framework) over a decade ago.  Individual analysts may use ROOT for their own work, but it is not part of our framework, and python is more widely used within IceCube for data analysis.  I could not find a recent article devoted to IceCube analysis software, but there is some information in https://arxiv.org/pdf/1311.5904.
Spencer Klein
LBNL & UC Berkeley  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 198.128.215.183 (talk) 19:25, 21 October 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  IceCube