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Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE

atlasengineering.io

21–30 of 136 posts

Re: Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE

#21
> Write equations; not code

This is a little odd to me - I generally prefer to write my math in code if its going to be executed. I find my preferences to be pen and paper (or whiteboard)> latex, so perhaps I am not the target demographic here.

Re: Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE

#22

This looks neat. Writing tip for the person speaking (or captioning): starting a sentence with "so" makes you come off like...something I don't have the word for, but it's bad. Don't do it. Condescending? Demeaning? It's like you don't think your audience is capable of following. I had to stop watching after four sentences in a row started that way.

Or we could not police people's language. "So" is a way to start sentences; like anything else, it can be overused. Just like "like", etc. There's a good podcast episode from John Mcwhorter on this "So" phenomenon. [0] TL;DL It has some interesting applications (including functioning as a discourse marker), and isn't going away anytime soon. [0]: https://slate.com/human-interest/2018/10/john-mcwhorter-on-s...

There was an article in Salon (or was it Slate?) in 1996 on beginning sentences in "So".

So, it's interesting it goes that far back.

Update: the language log says it goes back before the 1850s. With an early peak around 1870.

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2570

Re: Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE

#23

This "Atlas Engineering" is an unfortunate name conflict with the developers of the Nyxt browser: https://atlas.engineer

Seems like they're associated with the development of Nyxt since they link to Nyxt here -> https://source.atlas.engineer/

Re: Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE

#24
Tracking units is a thing that I rarely have a use for (as a non-engineer), but when I do, I’m totally mystified by how bad almost every language is at it. F# is the only actual programming language I found that even tries. It does a pretty decent job, but even it has some disappointing holes (e.g. not being able to understand g and kg as scaled versions of the same dimension).

I guess the overlap between physicists/engineers and type system/PLT people isn’t large enough.

Re: Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE

#25

This "Atlas Engineering" is an unfortunate name conflict with the developers of the Nyxt browser: https://atlas.engineer

Seems like they're associated with the development of Nyxt since they link to Nyxt here -> https://source.atlas.engineer/

Sorry, I phrased it badly: the OP links to http://atlasengineering.io and when I see "Atlass Engineering" I think of this: https://atlas.engineer

Re: Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE

#26
post #24

Tracking units is a thing that I rarely have a use for (as a non-engineer), but when I do, I’m totally mystified by how bad almost every language is at it. F# is the only actual programming language I found that even tries. It does a pretty decent job, but even it has some disappointing holes (e.g. not being able to understand g and kg as scaled versions of the same dimension). I guess the overlap between physicists/…

Isn't the "newtype" pattern something that addresses this issue elegantly?

Is there something that I'm missing here?

Re: Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE

#27
post #24

Tracking units is a thing that I rarely have a use for (as a non-engineer), but when I do, I’m totally mystified by how bad almost every language is at it. F# is the only actual programming language I found that even tries. It does a pretty decent job, but even it has some disappointing holes (e.g. not being able to understand g and kg as scaled versions of the same dimension). I guess the overlap between physicists/…

Isn't the "newtype" pattern something that addresses this issue elegantly? Is there something that I'm missing here?

Yep, it allows you to tag something a metres per second, but it doesn’t automatically make multiplying it by a duration yield a distance without writing any custom code. F# can do that, and it’s rather cool. There are dimensional analysis libraries for other languages, but none that I’m aware of baked in.

Re: Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE

#28
post #21

> Write equations; not code This is a little odd to me - I generally prefer to write my math in code if its going to be executed. I find my preferences to be pen and paper (or whiteboard)> latex, so perhaps I am not the target demographic here.

We must be evil twins in opposite universes. I've always wanted to be able to code the equations the way they look on paper. I actually am quite annoyed that most languages won't let you use Greek characters as variables. To me, it just makes it easier to spot errors.

Re: Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE

#29
post #24

Tracking units is a thing that I rarely have a use for (as a non-engineer), but when I do, I’m totally mystified by how bad almost every language is at it. F# is the only actual programming language I found that even tries. It does a pretty decent job, but even it has some disappointing holes (e.g. not being able to understand g and kg as scaled versions of the same dimension). I guess the overlap between physicists/…

Frink[0] is a language specifically designed for dealing with this kind of stuff. It has tons of units and conversions.

[0] - https://frinklang.org/#HowFrinkIsDifferent

Re: Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE

#30
post #24

Tracking units is a thing that I rarely have a use for (as a non-engineer), but when I do, I’m totally mystified by how bad almost every language is at it. F# is the only actual programming language I found that even tries. It does a pretty decent job, but even it has some disappointing holes (e.g. not being able to understand g and kg as scaled versions of the same dimension). I guess the overlap between physicists/…

Isn't the "newtype" pattern something that addresses this issue elegantly? Is there something that I'm missing here?

Not really, a units systems needs to be able to combine units in a useful way, like if I typed this:

  radius = 15 [mm]
  area = pi*radius^3
  force = 100 [N]

  def will_i_blow_up(pressure [Pa]):
    if(pressure > 1 [Gpa]):
      return "Oh no it blew up"

  will_i_blow_up( force/area )
should raise an error like "UnitsException, [N/mm^3] is not compatible with [Pa]". I could then look over my code and realize I should have written:

    area = pi*radius^2
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