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Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE

atlasengineering.io

131–136 of 136 posts

Re: Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE

#131
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?

How so? Every MATLAB code base I've seen rolls their own unit computation. The symbolic toolbox costs money and I've seen it on university installations only. The unitConvert command is rather new. Neither mechanisms are native to MATLAB and have awkward call patterns.

Re: Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

One usage of it that I find particularly annoying is in answer to questions. For instance:

"Where did you go to lunch?"

"So, we headed downtown..."

I think it's aggravating because it feels evasive, as if the person is pretending they're not answering a question and are instead just starting a new story.

Re: Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE

#133
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.

> if its going to be executed

You prefer to write code as code, which makes sense as it skips the translation part - but technical code is the implementation of the math so any given equation can represent multiple possible code-implementations.

From that perspective, it might make sense to separate the two, with good tooling. Since tooling generally isn't good, it's just as hassle.

Re: Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a while I toyed with writing an extensible spreadsheet engine/app that would allow extensions to do that kind of thing - maybe I should dust that idea off again! ;-)

Seems like many people started on this but never finished it, me too. I got carried away trying to speed up my custom grid control, and borked it up when I tried to use threads :-P.

I wanted to write something that would be "spreadsheet" like that would work as a normal desktop app, as a component in a server application and on the command line as well.

Combine that with all of the other grandiose plans (writing extension in WASM) then it's no wonder that I wasn't making too much progress... interesting though!

Re: Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE

#135
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…

For the sake of humour, isn't it a chapter in OnLisp ?

Re: Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Fusion 360 has tolerance parameters, that should work for you: https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/fusion-360/learn-expl...

Well, that‘s only for drawings and not for modelling. Also it‘s manual/cosmetic.
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