This reminded me of http://engineerjs.com/, a hobby project we did with some friends many years ago. One can write a JS code extended with unit support, linear algebra, complex numbers, create plots, share scripts, create libraries with interactive documentation support (this one never went public), etc. Everything runs in the browser on the user side. The test version (test.engineerjs.com) even has google drive support and can read/write files on it (although Google changed something in the meantime, and it started complaining about not being a verified application). The idea was that everyone could create libraries that others can import use directly. It doesn't have this nice GUI though.
Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE
81–90 of 136 posts
Re: Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE
#82This 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...
thank you, great podcast channel and episode you shared there.
Re: Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE
#83Tracking 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?
Sage/Sympy is the the python library for symbolic computation
Re: Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE
#84Tracking 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 was a physics student, I would have loved a spreadsheet that tracks units, and automatically does conversions as needed. There is another huge thing that this enables: Tracking uncertainties. It would be awesome if you could not just write "10", but "10 cm ± 1 cm". Then the spreadsheet could do error propagation! Even the simplest case of non-correlated errors would be useful. Also you could have functions like "weighted mean" that take the errors into account. We used to do these calculations manually with extra columns and a few macros, but it was always error prone.
Also, why is there no CAD program that allows me to enter errors? When I try to model real objects, say a room, the lengths never add up 100% and I always have gaps once I'm around the room. It would be great to say all these measurements are ± 1 cm, this one is ± 5 cm, and these angles are 90° ± 1°. And then it would do least-squares, and give me a really accurate model, or tell me where I have to measure again.
Re: Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!
Why?
Re: Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE
#86I've done a lot of napkin math in NaSC [0]. Unfortunately it was buggy and often crashed so I had to stop using it. I'd love for something like this that could also be checked into repo and used to "compile" into constants that can be used in code. For example: plan the resources required to run for `demand(requests)` and load that into code and run that to scale up/down replicas or something. [0] - https://appcenter…
Plugging, my own site, https://calcula.tech. It's not meant to compete with something like Atlas but I like to think it's great for napkin math, even though it's still quite early in development.
Re: Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Julia lets you use all sorts of Unicode characters as variable names and even as operators. It works quite well in the REPL, since it supports a TeX-like input method for Unicode characters. It's probably my favorite feature in the language, since it makes the code much more concise and expressive. (I've always hated having to step down from the mathematical beauty of LaTeX-typeset equations into the ugly reality of…
The problem with Julia is it only supports what Unicode supports directly. Which means you cannot have x,y,z as subscript for coordinate variables because Unicode, for some weird reason, does not have the full alphabet in subscript or superscript form. Also, when I first dived into Julia I found quite a few Unicode symbols that, when used as function names, lead to all kinds of weird compiler errors. Kind of defeats the purpose.
A language hoping to make this complete would have to do special formatting that allow super- and subscripting any Unicode symbol. But that won't work in a normal terminal...
Re: Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE
#88Tracking 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/…
Blockpad ( https://blockpad.net/ ) and Mathematica do it.
Re: Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE
#89If it's not OSS it is unlikely to succeed.
bold statement, what makes you think so?
Re: Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE
#90This is really cool. Is the main use case for something like this over wolfram alpha the use of writing the equations directly? Are there any other features that this has hidden that I can't get on wolfram alpha?
WolframAlpha only works if you can write your calculation on one line, and without manipulating variables.