foreword.qmd

# Foreword {.unnumbered}

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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_H._Green_Library)
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
[![](images/geostats.svg){fig-alt="GeoStats.jl" width=110px}](https://github.com/JuliaEarth/GeoStats.jl)
framework for the
[![](images/julia.svg){fig-alt="Julia" width=40px}](https://julialang.org)
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.