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Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE

atlasengineering.io

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Re: Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE

#61

Post by chobytes »

gmiller123456 wrote: post #28
mvzvm wrote: 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.

Agreed. With normal math notation I can just see how something works. In programming language math notation I cant even always parse the hierarchy.

Re: Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE

#62

Post by chrismorgan »

jchw wrote: post #18
chrismorgan wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like it or not, perception matters. Take accents as a similar and more obvious case: rural accents will often cause you to be looked down on, and so some find it extremely valuable to deliberately adjust their accent (in some lines of work, it’s pretty much essential to hone a certain accent). So it’s often worth at least contemplating such feedback, if you care about being taken seriously. (But don’t get too hung up…

Well, I think that starting a sentence with “So” is pretty natural and common. Indeed: > So it’s often worth at least contemplating such feedback, if you care about being taken seriously. (Maybe you were intending to joke here, but it still came off as “pretty natural.”)

My use of the word “so” there occurred naturally and I deliberately left it there. However, it’s a different sense of the word “so”: it’s concretely meaning therefore, rather than just being a meaningless filler.

Re: Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE

#63

Post by analog31 »

sidpatil wrote: post #44
R0b0t1 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, in the fields of computer science, data science, etc. However, this is not the case in more traditional engineering fields (electrical, mechanical, etc.) which tend to teach MATLAB throughout undergraduate education and subsequently rely on it throughout graduate education, research, and industry. MATLAB has some significant benefits over the FOSS alternatives, such as its first-party commercially-supported ext…

I suspect Matlab will have a long tail in engineering education, for a number of reasons: 1) It's effectively free for educational use thanks to generous site licenses. 2) A lot of curricula have been developed around it. 3) Indisputably, it works.

But outside of academia, let's face it, the most widespread "engineering IDE" is Excel. Relatively few engineers continue to use math and equations after they graduate. A lot of their calculations can be done in Excel, or within their CAD software. The biggest threat to Matlab is the automation of engineering calculations.

As a result, it's more mixed, with the people who are actually doing quantitative work coming from a variety of fields including math and physics, but also from areas that have no prior loyalty to Matlab such as biology and statistics.

For instance in my department, any deeply quantitative work is done by a very small handful of "math people" who may or may not have "engineer" job titles, but whose degrees are in math or the physical sciences.

Re: Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE

#64

Post by rurban »

burke wrote: 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/…

When I implemented unit support into my engine I used the units cmdline tool. Was by far the best and easiest to use. https://www.gnu.org/software/units/manual/html_node/Command-...

Re: Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE

#66

Post by dragonwriter »

cwhy wrote: post #34
heisenzombie wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> This is rather a math-specific operation

Math is a kind of a core use case for, really, almost any programming language, and is central to much of what computers are used for (as is hinted at in their name.)

Though dealing with this aspect of units is less “math-specific” than central to the relation between math and real-world meaning, which is arguably even more important than abstract math in computing applications.

Re: Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE

#67

Post by chris_wot »

analog31 wrote: post #63
sidpatil wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, in the fields of computer science, data science, etc. However, this is not the case in more traditional engineering fields (electrical, mechanical, etc.) which tend to teach MATLAB throughout undergraduate education and subsequently rely on it throughout graduate education, research, and industry. MATLAB has some significant benefits over the FOSS alternatives, such as its first-party commercially-supported ext…

I suspect Matlab will have a long tail in engineering education, for a number of reasons: 1) It's effectively free for educational use thanks to generous site licenses. 2) A lot of curricula have been developed around it. 3) Indisputably, it works. But outside of academia, let's face it, the most widespread "engineering IDE" is Excel. Relatively few engineers continue to use math and equations after they graduate. A…

Dear God I hope engineers doing anything safety related aren’t using Excel!

Re: Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE

#68

Post by anigbrowl »

R0b0t1 wrote: post #40
sidpatil wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Actually I'm interested in any tool that saves me from writing code. I much prefer working at the symbolic level because as soon as I open a regular IDE I start thinking about my programming language instead of the problem I'm working on. I don't program full time any more so it's not a subconscious process, and really I would like the computer to do the work of translating my symbolic concept into syntactically correct language. If it works well, I don't really care that it's proprietary.

Re: Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE

#69

Post by nl »

Why the editorial in the title (currently "Atlas, a (hopefully) better engineering IDE")?

Page title is "A better engineering tool". Hard to say exactly what it is.. a competitor to Mathematica maybe? But it's not an IDE in the way most software developers would understand an IDE

Re: Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE

#70

Post by jamil7 »

burke wrote: 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/…

Swift has a pretty nice measurements package built in https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundation/measure...
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