It's come to my attention that John Bradley, author of the "xv" tool has died. I never knew John, but I used "xv" a LOT in the early days of my career as a graduate student working in computational physics.
In many ways "xv" might have been more pivotal to my early career than even Python.
In this thread, I'm going to offer my tribute to "xv" and say a bit about its role in my 1990s "vibe"-coding project that definitely did NOT involve any AI.
This will probably meander a bit. 1/n?
xv was an integral part of day-to-day research activities. Basically, all we did all day was solve differential equations. This involved a ton of simulation, plotting, data analysis, and visualization.
xv was this really modest tool that did one thing really well--make it easy to look at images. You could browse images, adjust color maps, flip between images, and so forth.
If you walked by a colleague's workstation on any given day, you'd see like 20 instances of xv running at once. 2/n?
David Beazley
Uriel Fanelli