Hi,
>I wonder if the author considered an input method where keypresses translate directly into a rendered equation?
Personally, I don't like such systems, because I always end up moving the cursor up/down/left/right trying to add parenthesis here and there; so I am not considering adding it. I really feel better with fast, raw text input.
>The other point the author makes about discoverability of operators like sqrt and cbrt, I feel that you could circumvent it by introducing a semantic search feature for operators.
Indeed, I can add this kind of things by adding keywords to the documentation items. Currently I rather tried to narrow the search results, but I can expand them a little with some experience on what the users really needed.
>The last question I have is if the author has looked at libraries like Calcium (...) or the work that went into the Android calculator recently
I don't know Calcium, and I am not a smartphone user, so Android is beyond my little world :-)
Calcium seems very interesting on its own, but it is unlikely that I can use it in Chalk. I already built my own abstractions to do everything low-level related to bit manipulation and garbage bits. Adding a little formal calculus will certainly be home-made either.
However, like I did with ARBLIB, I can also cherrypick just a subset of the library that would exactly fix one problem or give some precious help even on a single feature. I will have a deeper look at its API and how it can mix up with the current Chalk design. Thanks for pointing it out !