Live data from Hacker News

Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE

atlasengineering.io

31–40 of 136 posts

Re: Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE

#31
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/…

I regularly use "pint" for Python:

https://pint.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

I'm sure it's not as good as a true type system could be, but it works pretty transparently due to Python's duck typing.

Re: Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE

#33
post #32

If it's not OSS it is unlikely to succeed.

That's not true, in my experience. This tool reminds me of MathCAD, which is both moderately popular and proprietary.

The most popular numerical computing environment for engineering is MATLAB, which is proprietary.

Re: Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE

#34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is rather a math-specific operation (type conversion on math operators), not the scope of general purpose language. A lot of dependent typed language can achieve this naturally and most languages with ADT can simulate this.

Re: Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE

#35
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/…

Julia has the Unitful package [1], which does a decent job. It's quite ergonomic, and Julia's design helps with making existing code/libraries play nicely with Unitful-encoded units/values.

[1] https://github.com/PainterQubits/Unitful.jl

Re: Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE

#36
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/…

This is something that Matlab really shines at with symbolic computation. Is there really not a numpy/scipy equivalent?

Re: Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE

#37

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.

The way it’s used in that video is not uncommon in at least Australian English. It’s largely just a filler when used in this sense.

It's very common in American English as well, and it functions the same way, as a filler. I'm not sure where the OP got the sense that it was condescending.

Re: Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE

#38

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.

It's kind of annoying and bad English, but I don't think it's condescending.

Re: Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE

#40
post #32

If it's not OSS it is unlikely to succeed.

That's not true, in my experience. This tool reminds me of MathCAD, which is both moderately popular and proprietary. The most popular numerical computing environment for engineering is MATLAB, which is proprietary.

The state of the art is done in other languages now, specifically Python with numpy and extensions, R, or Julia. There was a time for proprietary systems like this but I think it has passed.
Post reply on HN