It may be a question of generation, but I agree with Larry :-) Van Laar & Schenk (2018) <http://journals.iucr.org/a/issues/2018/02/00/ib5058/> do not say that Hugo doesn't deserve credit because "he only developed the software". That is like waving a red flag to all of us "software developers", and risks impassioning an otherwise interesting debate. Saying that "before Rietveld" (yes, it risks becoming theological) Loopstra and van Laar were weighing paper, is also provocative (and untrue). Crediting Rietveld with the Cagliotti formulae is amusing, as is referring to him together with Newton and Einstein.
vL&S wrote a paper with first hand knowledge of the time, and backed it up from the literature. If we are going to criticise it, we have to do it just as seriously, with references such as the Finger, Cox, and Jephcoat example mentioned by Brian. My own understanding, which predates 1985 by more than a decade, was that you couldn't know what code was in GSAS, simply because, like many of the later profile refinement codes, it wasn't published (until it was accidentally revealed :-). Instead, the Taylor (1980) code, referenced by vL&H, was probably the first code that was truly independent of Rietveld's (but depended on ORFLS). And no, Rietveld didn't invent an intensity extraction algorithm later used by LeBail; Pawley's code predated LeBail, and both are more related to classical ideas of peak extraction than to Rietveld. Rietveld certainly deserves credit for writing a beautiful program, and publishing the code, which transformed all of powder diffraction (belatedly for some). vL&S have only tried to show that "profile refinement" as Rietveld himself called it, was the collective effort of three people. They criticise more our community "*which had been slow to appreciate the significance of the work in the beginning, compensated decades later by lavish praise*". Alan PS It is indeed sad that Hugo is no longer with us to reply, but his web page <http://home.wxs.nl/~rietv025/> is still there to redress the balance (a little excessively:-) On 14 August 2018 at 03:46, Larry Finger <larry.fin...@lwfinger.net> wrote: > > > My interpretation is not that the writer of the software should have been > discredited, but that the other contributors should have been authors. > > Your example of Finger, Cox, and Jephcoat is a good one. Yes, we did stand > on the shoulders of others, but I think we gave them credit in the > manuscript. ______________________________________________ * Dr Alan Hewat, NeutronOptics, Grenoble, FRANCE * <alan.he...@neutronoptics.com> +33.476.98.41.68 http://www.NeutronOptics.com/hewat ______________________________________________
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