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| Subject: | Re: [gislist] masters vs. certificate |
| Date: |
06/16/2005 06:00:00 PM |
| From: |
Dupler, Phillip |
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-----Original Message-----
From: Brian Russo [mailto:brian@russo-associates.com]
Subject: Re: [gislist] masters vs. certificate
>You'll need a programming background to get very far. In my view (no
>offense to anyone), that's where many of the older "masters" fall short.
I'd already been thinking about this since I guess I'm one of those "old masters", having been at it at least since the days when AML was still king. I know enough VBA to use the "advanced" dialogs in ArcMap to evaluate cases and such, but thats about as much as I've ever done with it. When used in an ad-hoc manner for analysis by specialists in a field, there doesn't seem to be absolute necessity for programming as most of the functionality is there in one software or another.
I had a technician working for me who was a programming whiz and would write a vba script to do just about every little thing regardless if it was going to ever be repeated. I could usually do things faster just flittering around all the buttons on the screen but I have seen where he was able to do things in ArcMap via accessing the arcobjects that it could not otherwise do. (My solution was always to fall back to good ole Workstation ArcInfo or occasionally to fire up MapInfo for things I know it does well.)
More and more tho, we see "non-GIS" personnel asking for GIS on their desktop and learning a few basic functions. Ideally, for those people to do routine things, we have web developers moving us toward ArcIMS interfaces rather than programmers extending their desktop environments. We also see more and more other software systems trying to share data and capabilities with GIS but that seems to be the realm of "professional" programmers to do that integration. The largest extent of programming for GIS in our organization is in making custom tools for staff to do data maintenance, but thats not an ongoing or perpetual thing, rather just needs to be done periodically with software updates or business process changes.
I just wonder what should be the advice to younger folks entering the profession as well as us "old masters" who need to keep up. If you are not wanting to be a professional programmer, what level of proficiency in programming is going to be necessary going forward? Will things like ESRI's new "Model Builder" ultimately give us visual programming capabilities to extend analysis as far as we need? How often will "analysts" need to "automate" routine tasks through vba or other high-level language? Lastly, how far will web technologies go in extending "analysis" capabilities to "non-GISers". Do we all need to learn to develop those web pages and write those data input tools if we are to flourish?
Phil Dupler
GIS Analyst
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