Frink

I'm surprised the site died. It looks like a static website, and even a small webserver in a default configuration can serve thousands of files per second.

Re: Frink

#5

Post by tosh » Sun, Aug 12, 2018, 8:58 PM UTC

The units file (and its comments) makes a thrilling read

https://frinklang.org/frinkdata/units.txt

Re: Frink

#6

Post by Twirrim » Sun, Aug 12, 2018, 9:03 PM UTC

I love these examples:

    Let's say you wanted to fill your bedroom up with water. How much water would it take? Let's say your room measures 10 feet by 12 feet wide by 8 feet high.

    10 feet 12 feet 8 feet -> gallons
    552960/77 (approx. 7181.298701298701)

    It would take approximately 7181 gallons to fill it. Note that you get both an exact fraction and an approximation. (If you don't want to see the fraction, put a decimal point in any of the numbers, like 10. or 10.0.) How much would that weigh, if you filled it with water? Frink has the unit "water" which stands for the density of water.

    10. feet 12 feet 8 feet water -> pounds
    59930.84215309883

    So it would weigh almost 60,000 pounds. What if you knew that your floor could only support 2 tons? How deep could you fill the room with water?

    2. tons / (10 feet 12 feet water) -> feet
    0.5339487791320047

    So you could only fill it about 0.53 feet deep. It'll be a pretty sad pool party.

This sits firmly in the "Neat, and now I'm sad I don't have a practical use case for this"

Re: Frink

#7

Post by scotty79 » Sun, Aug 12, 2018, 9:10 PM UTC

Athas wrote: post #4

tosh wrote: post #3

Mirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20180812184707/https://frinklang...

I'm surprised the site died. It looks like a static website, and even a small webserver in a default configuration can serve thousands of files per second.

I don't think it's static: https://web.archive.org/web/20170718015315/https://frinklang...

Re: Frink

#8

Post by messe » Sun, Aug 12, 2018, 9:16 PM UTC

tosh wrote: post #5

The units file (and its comments) makes a thrilling read https://frinklang.org/frinkdata/units.txt

The section/rant about the candela is hilarious. Concluding with:

> In short, candela = EPIC FAIL.

Re: Frink

#9

Post by simias » Sun, Aug 12, 2018, 9:24 PM UTC

Twirrim wrote: post #6

I love these examples: Let's say you wanted to fill your bedroom up with water. How much water would it take? Let's say your room measures 10 feet by 12 feet wide by 8 feet high. 10 feet 12 feet 8 feet -> gallons 552960/77 (approx. 7181.298701298701) It would take approximately 7181 gallons to fill it. Note that you get both an exact fraction and an approximation. (If you don't want to see the fraction, put a decimal…

Amusingly, this example wouldn't be nearly as impressive if you used metric units instead.

Re: Frink

#10

Post by yeellow » Sun, Aug 12, 2018, 9:31 PM UTC

Frink is really great as a sophisticated calculator (it is also quite powerful and nice programming language, but I've never used it's full potential). It helped me with cosmology classes assignments (very convenient unit conversions and built-in all physical constants I could wish for) . I just wish it had a better ide. I would love Frink Jupiter kernel with nice latex formula display. I emailed the author about that, but he wasn't interested. Maybe some skilled person from HN would take the challenge? Frink deserves more love, the amount of details included there is amazing and it's one man job. Very impressive.