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comment by veen
veen  ·  1921 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: November 14, 2018

R is not meant for GIS - it can handle some geo data in tables, but it is really no match for PG or ArcPy. R is much better for statistical analyses and one of my colleagues does most of his work in Excel or R because of it. He’s the only non-geo data scientist, though, and he doesn’t use R’s geo abilities because it’s not powerful enough.

PG can do a lot, especially if you’re clever at combining the rather-basic-but-incredibly-fast functions it offers. (And then there’s always QGIS.) ArcPy has a larger suite of functions, but only within the realm of things Esri wants you to do, so if you’re out there doing anything groundbreaking, you run into barriers more easily.

By the way - there’s an ArcGIS For Home license which gives you an Advanced ArcGIS license (including Pro) for $100/yr if you pinky promise to never use it commercially. I used it for my own experiments.





user-inactivated  ·  1921 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Jackpot, thanks for the rundown! I've been eyeing the Home license for Esri, but what I'm looking to do would be a mix of personal and business. The lighthouses in California map you posted a while back, which program did you use for that? Assume that qualified well for a personal experiment/ArcGIS?

veen  ·  1918 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I made the lighthouses with ArcGIS Pro, mostly because it's what I know best. But it was not much more than a good ordering of layers to get the desired effect, so QGIS would've worked just as fine.

My opinion is that it's personal until you start to turn a profit. Legal departments of large, loaded tech companies might disagree with me on that, but I haven't heard from them yet.

user-inactivated  ·  1918 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Scripts driving Cairo or just scribbling postscript to a file works fine too if you don't want to buy ArcGIS just to have it draw things for you. The ewkb you get out of PostGIS isn't hard to parse. Placing labels legibly is a more complicated problem than anyone expects at first, but the rest is straightforward.