Subject: re: Gaussian revised GUI

From: Joe Leonard <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2001 18:22:24 -0500

Folks,

Who's willing to pay Gaussian, Inc. to rewrite their code so as to have
a better/more modern GUI?  Why not just get one of the QM packages
which offers graphics and use that as a GUI for Gaussian?  There's
GaussView, and Spartan at least used to work with Gaussian (been
too long since I've used it)...

I've been in this business a long time, and I've not seen terribly many
cases where people wanted useability vs. feature improvements (either
for their support money, or whatever).  Rewriting and validating code's
a SIGNIFICANT undertaking, and not one to be taken on whim.  I've
only seen a little GAMESS and AMBER recently, and their input
(Fortran NAMELIST, I think) is 1960's technology.  So it's not just
Gaussian to which this argument can be applied.

FWIW, I've not seen anybody redoing MOPAC's GUI, or any other
dusty-deck codes.  There are probably new things which I am unaware
of, as I've not worked in the QM business since 1995.  It would not
surprise me if doing the GUI (or API) is harder work than getting the
algebra of the QM code "right", too.

My 2 cents,

Joe
[email-masked]

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From: "Mark Thompson" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2001 18:54:22 -0800

Joe,

You hit the nail on the head.  My experience is that getting a GUI to do a
good job of making the setting up of complicated tasks tractable is easily
as time consuming as writing the underlying modeling codes.

Mark

=================================
Mark Thompson
Planaria Software
Seattle, WA.
http://www.planaria-software.com
=================================

-----Original Message-----
From: Computational Chemistry List [mailto:[email-masked]]On
Behalf Of Joe Leonard
Sent: Wednesday, December 12, 2001 3:22 PM
To: [email-masked]
Subject: CCL:Gaussian revised GUI

My 2 cents,

Joe
[email-masked]