Foreword

I’ve always felt that something was off with existing approaches to geospatial data science in other programming languages. I remember sitting in the beautiful Green library at Stanford after a short introductory course on GIS with R, and wondering why it had to be so “computer sciency”:

• What on Earth is a “LineString”? Isn’t a “Line” a geometric object with infinite length?
• Why do I need to learn this low-level distinction between “raster” and “vector” data?
• And many other questions…

After years of my PhD, I finally envisioned a more general approach, through the continuous design and development of the framework for the programming language. This book is the first attempt to share this vision with the broader scientific community.

There is a long journey until the technology reaches its full potential, but it is getting there! I hope that the book will enlighten you on some of those issues and that you can benefit from the open source software we built over the years.