lawrence-bird
Hi Lawrence,
That is great news! Thanks for updating us and this thread.
There are indeed some missing components of the Python API, and this does have to do with maintainability. Most of our core developers use the MATLAB API, so when new modules are developed, they sometimes do not get translates to Python right away. As well, modules that have plotting capabilities written for MATLAB are not going to have an easy or direct translation to multiple Python plotting libraries, so we have left it up to the user to decided which library works best for them. In the future, we may decide to go with a default plotting library, but there are no plans currently for this.
If you wanted to go about patching missing functionality/modules, I would go through the following steps:
I understand not wanting to commit to the "lesser" of the available APIs, but I'm not sure there is really a huge gap in functionality besides the plotting capabilities. Indeed, most of what ISSM does is actually handled by the C++ core while the APIs are mostly for file I/O, model setup, result retrieval, and plotting. I'd be happy to help come up with a rough number of missing Python modules if you think that would help you make your decision.
Best,
Justin