Re: Stop making unneeded improvements

[paul]

[Apologies for the lack of paragraph breaks in that last - taken by 
surprise after using a crude editor]

Thank you, Marcus, for taking so much trouble to respond so 
comprehensively. And with such good grace!

Your detailed section on dependencies is very sobering and helps me 
understand much better how vulnerable GR is in that respect, plus how 
essential it is to restructure from time to time and how painful that is 
going to be. In some ways the timing was unfortunate for me - a few 
years earlier or later your project might have been a little less 
"dynamic".

Also I can now understand your (and presumably the majority) perspective 
on the Companion as more of a debugging tool, while for me it served 
more like Visual Studio for a WinForms project (not a very accurate 
comparison, but I think you'll see what I'm getting at). The fact 
remains that GRC exists, it is apparently used quite widely by people 
like me with lesser skills, and its GUI wrappers for on-tree blocks 
enable a fantastic scope for some *highly* complex system prototyping.

You may not want to emphasise GRC's stand-alone talents but flowgraphing 
is an increasingly capable and popular tool class, not entirely unlike 
GUI visual designers.

In contrast, my (prototype) flowgraph was so simple as to be almost 
laughable (and I should have made that clear at the start). Yes, it was 
a "radio": reading from an I-Q file, the essentials being several stages 
of frequency translation, decimation, assorted filters, Hilberts, 
Costas, finally audio to sound card. Just rather different from the many 
examples on the web. As for GUI, a couple of spectrums and waterfalls, a 
'scope, assorted selectors, and tuning.

Ah, tuning. I ended up with one slider for *each* decade digit from 1 
MHz down to 0.01 Hz (don't ask). That's why I was looking for up/down 
buttons to configure tuning step using a single slider. Now you'll 
probably tell me I'm a moron because XYZ will deliver exactly that. Oh 
well, I'm a hermit and don't ask questions but should have done.

That brings me with trepidation to DSP understanding/skills. My maths 
degree is ancient with a thick coating of rust and, however deep you 
dig, not a mention of difference equations. So I'm a baby in this new 
world. But please give me credit for having read hundreds of pages on 
DSP at various levels - not enough to use Matlab or write Python 
routines, but enough to configure ready-made GRC filter blocks and be 
aware when I'm over my head.

The point is, I take the view that (broadly speaking) there are two 
levels of understanding: creator and informed/educated user. You are the 
first type, I'm somewhere near the other end of the scale. By analogy, I 
can use a highly sophisticated communications receiver to great effect 
with almost no expertise in electronics design.

And the bottom line on this one is [as always, from my perspective] for 
a wide range of applications you *can* get by without anything more than 
GRC (i.e. no coding). And where GRC does fall "short of that goal", 
*maybe* GRC warrants a bit more effort to widen the goal mouth. It just 
feels a bit harsh hearing "nothing requires that you use GRC" if GRC is 
ostensibly up to the job while the skills gap to make do without it is 
so daunting.

Sorry to have laboured that point.

As previously, I have learned a lot from your exposition, Marcus. And 
I'm grateful for your time responding. It's not my intention to try and 
have the last word, so I'll shut up now and go back to my cave.

[BTW good to read Geof Nieboer's 4 Jan update on Windows installer]

Paul White