[HN Gopher] Math Inspector: A Visual Programming Environment for...
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Math Inspector: A Visual Programming Environment for Scientific
Computing
Author : jarmitage
Score : 113 points
Date : 2021-01-31 14:15 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mathinspector.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (mathinspector.com)
| physicsgraph wrote:
| The block coding interface looks smooth. I'm curious about how
| the interface scales for complex projects.
|
| The documentation integration is nice.
|
| Great work!
| calhoun137 wrote:
| Thank you so much! Well I tried to make it work so that
| literally any project you have sitting on your system can be
| imported into the app. In principle it should work, in practice
| the amount of block code elements can quickly become
| overwhelming.
|
| At the end of wrapping up the beta version, I was using math
| inspector to create math inspector, this is how I wrote the
| TextParser[1] class, and there is a certain beauty to the way
| the files were synchronized, but since everything was still in
| development I finished up by running a test file from the
| command line instead, and have not had a chance to keep working
| on that aspect.
|
| I think the more the app gets dog-fooded in this way, the more
| clear it will become what the optimal UI/UX is. Math Inspector
| is not an IDE, but it does create an additional visual layer
| that is kind of helpful during development, especially for
| quickly testing/iterating any changes
|
| [1]
| https://github.com/MathInspector/MathInspector/blob/master/m...
| zby wrote:
| Looks very similar to Enso (formely Luna):
| https://medium.com/@enso_org
| besnn00 wrote:
| There is also another Enso on github but it seems to be a
| visual programming language.
| andrewnc wrote:
| When it was Luna, I tried using it because I love new
| programming languages. It froze my MBP completely and was an
| absolute pain to uninstall.
|
| I hope the rebrand and rewrite fix those issues because it
| seems awesome
| wdanilo wrote:
| Hi, Enso team here! Luna 1.0 (long time ago) had serious
| uninstall problems on Windows because of auto-restarting
| daemon processes. It was fixed long time ago. Enso uses a
| completely rewritten services architecture (as well as
| rewritten compiler and GUI) and something like that should
| never ever happen again.
| autoditype wrote:
| How long ago was this? I wonder what the bug was. I want to
| try this, but don't want to go through a painful uninsall
| experience
| calhoun137 wrote:
| Project author here. I have been working so hard for the past 3
| months on this app, and last year tried to submitting the alpha
| version to hacker news a few times but that version was a lot
| less polished and didn't get much attention. The response today
| has been really wonderful, and has been so encouraging!
|
| Feel free to ask me any questions or request new features.
|
| Everything is still very much in active development and it would
| be amazing if anyone is interested in contributing the source
| code[1]. I just took a few days of rest and am gearing up to
| begin posting a bunch of math education video's on my youtube
| channel using all the new features which I built just for that
| purpose. I will be adding new features as I need them during the
| video creation process. Most importantly, coming soon there is
| going to be a feature to export animations to mp4.
|
| [1] https://github.com/MathInspector/MathInspector
| wdanilo wrote:
| Hi, congratulations on the release! I admire your dedication -
| the amount of work you had to put in this project as a single
| developer is huge. I'd love to chat, but I can't find any
| contact info, would you be so nice and just ping me via
| wojciech.danilo@enso.org? :)
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| I cannot overstate how AMAZING this is! We sorely need more
| tools to ease mathematical intuition. As far as we've come with
| scientific computing we still can't feel and touch our math
| easily.
|
| I looked into implementing visual programming for my work a few
| years back but figured it'd be an unrealistic amount of work
| given the state of visual programming libraries in Python (I'd
| looked at PyFlow back then but it wasn't quite mature enough).
| I'm definitely interested in contributing. I have experience in
| both numpy and pygame and I do scientific computing for a
| living.
|
| Since you accept feature requests, one tool I've been looking
| for is something to implement and visualize partial
| differential equation systems easily. It's basically impossible
| to program cleanly in Python. There are systems built from
| dozens of equations that each are expressed by something like
| 200 characters per line of code that look something like:
| x1 ** 3.4 + (PA / P**(3x2 + z0)) * V**t - y + (z + (7 - De/4) *
| 5) * DVe - ...
|
| It's basically unreadable, un-debuggable, it's a pain to
| implement, a pain to iterate over and good luck to whoever
| comes after to try and understand what it does. And you might
| try to use the Object-Oriented paradigm to make it more modular
| and understandable with verbose functions and variables but in
| the end it still doesn't work. Matlab's got it working somewhat
| with simulink & Cie but who wants to use matlab these days.
| Your work already goes a long way with regards to this problem
| but what would bring it over the top for me would be the
| ability to render a block system into a latex equation so I can
| compare my implementation directly with the paper it came from.
| The second would be to have aliases for functions, some sort of
| metadata, so that functions can have verbose names and their
| associated mathematical symbol (velocity -> v).
| selimthegrim wrote:
| You also might want to check out Blockpad
| (http://www.blockpad.net)
| calhoun137 wrote:
| Thank you so much! I feel like there is a massive vacuum in
| the software ecosystem for a product like this.
|
| I'd really like to support LaTeX in multiple ways throughout
| the app, and have plans to build a feature to automate the
| animation of equations. There is also another planned feature
| to try and create an integration with sympy[1], and it's
| likely there will be some overlap between the sympy and latex
| stuff. I don't think there is a good way to automate
| exporting functions to LaTeX, even using sympy, because its
| not 1-1 (not sure though).
|
| I think having the kind of visual environment math inspector
| offers has a lot of potential when it comes to computational
| PDE's. At some point I want to draw the Lorenz attractor,
| which is something that probably won't work very nicely with
| the current plotting system in the app. It would also be
| amazing to do fluid dynamics simulations, but that is a
| really huge job for sure.
|
| [1] https://www.sympy.org/en/index.html
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