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Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE

atlasengineering.io

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Re: Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE

#111

Post by 0x2c8 »

dotancohen wrote: post #106
gmiller123456 wrote: post #28

Earlier 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.

> I actually am quite annoyed that most languages won't > let you use Greek characters as variables. $ python3 >>> φ = 2 >>> σ = 3 >>> φ + σ 5

This. Also, in IPython, one can write greek letters by doing:

    \Sigma
which will get converted to an actual Σ.

Re: Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE

#112

Post by thecupisblue »

I love this!

Even tho I am not a engineer as such, when I develop or wonder something I have to use Numi, and visualisations are always DIY. Really excited about the Atlas block exchange part, I want a library of common math/physics functions & values so I dont have to google.

Re: Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE

#113

Post by AYBABTME »

captainmuon wrote: post #84
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 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 lik…

I built a Go library that would track units + errors when I was doing my undergrad... but never published it anywhere and lost the files, sadly. Anyways, I agree this would be neat.

Re: Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE

#114

Post by sk5t »

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/…

You might find the Squants library for Scala interesting; it even seems like an apt usage of some oft-questioned language features.

https://github.com/typelevel/squants

Re: Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE

#115

Post by analog31 »

chris_wot wrote: post #67
analog31 wrote: post #63

Earlier 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!

There's a lot of engineering that just isn't at that level of critical. If it is, then they do it in their CAD software. If it's safety related, there might be just one person in the department who handles that kind of stuff.

Now, I have a relative who is a retired nuclear power plant operator. They did things a bit more formally there. ;-)

Re: Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE

#116

Post by gjm11 »

When I see this sort of thing I always want to know something that is seldom made clear: what is actually implemented so far?.

The video begins "This is Atlas, a concept for a new engineering IDE". (To me, that strongly suggests that rather little is actually implemented yet, and that what we're about to see is a lot of canned demos, because otherwise it would be a new engineering IDE, not just a "concept" for one.) But then most of what follows, and pretty much everything on the webpage, says that Atlas does this or that, not "will do".

And the trouble with "concepts" is that unlike actual implementations they aren't much of a guide to what you're ever actually going to get. It's easy to think "X would be cool" and say "Atlas does X", but some Xs are much more realistically implementable than others, and how interesting Atlas actually is depends on which of those Xs are ever actually going to be implemented.

But reading the page and watching the video I have literally no idea where the project is on a scale from "we wrote down some things it would be cool to do and rigged up a demo that pretends to do them" to "everything here is already implemented, though there are a few gaps and bugs here and there".

Re: Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE

#117

Post by topaz0 »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #77
chobytes wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In general, that depends on the programming language though, and not all things in math are easy to parse and rely on precedence rules. Math is far from optimal in this aspect and I guess you just have experience in reading math.

Mathematical notation is not perfect, but it does a pretty good job of choosing clarity when ambiguity might be a problem. For a basic example, the fraction bar for division makes groupings obvious, where a single '/' in a long string of text can get visually lost. Of course it's understandable that most programming languages would shy away from special notation like that in favor of plain text, but it gives mathematical notation a strong clarity advantage, in my opinion.

Re: Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE

#118

Post by rurban »

chris_wot wrote: post #67
analog31 wrote: post #63

Earlier 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!

I once sold a program for large network optimization problem in Excel. The calculations of the sewer planning for an entire district, a few million homes in northern Italy. Excel was the best for the job, integrated into a CAD package.

Safety? Wrong planning could lead to some problems as seenm in poorly planned cities (e.g. Houston), but I guess they are largely ignorable. "Common Mistakes in Planning of Sewer Networks and STPs" https://www.springerprofessional.de/common-mistakes-in-plann...

My district was properly planned, Excel was the best. Would not recommend doing something similar by hand.

Re: Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE

#120

Post by andrewzah »

nononbody wrote: post #20
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…

This whole convo is reminiscent of the "filler world" phenomenon - e.g. especially if I'm feeling relaxed, I'll say "Like" a lot (I lived in CA for a decade, grew up/went to school in Boston) and I've seen that especially people from Texas will get really hung up on it (ok, big state, like CA, I have double digit individual data on this from a skew of states) and I thought about applying an audio plugin to filter out…

That doesn't have anything to do with Texas; like, overusage, like, of "like" is, like, incredibly annoying. Growing up in the midwest, we were taught to not use filler words/sounds like "uhh" or "um" in general.
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