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Comment by bitforger | Hacker News Reader

I tried using this once... it wasn't super great.

1. The documentation is sorely lacking.

2. Which makes the inheritance hierarchy (which is already a little unintuitive) really hard to grok.

3. There's this weird home-rolled way of doing default property inheritance that took me a long time to wrap my head around.

In the end, I ended up coding a short interactive thing[1] for my blog using Paper.js. It's a great idea, but could really use some love and maybe a stronger philosophy to guide development. Right now it feels more like a few hacks thrown together.

[1] http://mitchgordon.me/math/2019/03/18/multiplying-complex-nu...

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He can't win. People bug him to find out what software he uses. He says he wrote it. People bug him to release it. And then complain it is not properly documented or is unintuitive.

'A few hacks thrown together' seems awfully pejorative. It is a tool he has developed over the years to enable him to produce the high-quality videos he releases.

People don’t know what they want. Or rather, they conflate what they want with real things that are close to, but not quite exactly, what they had in their mind. They then get frustrated because it doesn’t match what they imagined the whole time... but nobody told them it was!

It's different people making the different complaints.

In general, you can't please all the people all the time.

GP isn't a complaint, but constructive criticism. When we lose the ability to tolerate criticism, we lose the capability of progress.

It's not that constructive though, just seems like a complaint.

How do you differentiate those two things?

To me constructive means there is a suggestion of how to improve.

Don't get me wrong, I love his videos, and I think it's really nice of him to open-source the stuff.

But like some of the other comments have mentioned, it's not a general purpose tool... it's more like he open-sourced his dot files.

You can certainly make a few things work, but it would be nice to see a community of interested individuals come together to flesh out the abstractions, make sure everything is documented and works as advertised. As it is now, the class hierarchy is a little... misshapen. It's not clear what classes are responsible for what functionality, and how everything fits together in a nice, orthogonal way.

> Right now it feels more like a few hacks thrown together.

Because that's what it is. It's a tool made over time by him for his videos. The only reason it's out there is because people keep asking to see the code. It was never meant to be a fully documented, easy to use public tool. It's a personal project that was shared for the sake of openness.

That being said, there aren't many tools like it out there, and I'd love to see someone take bits and piece from here, and create a proper tool from the ground up.

what would a proper tool look like? I really want to write such a tool. But I can't formalize the product.

I would start by looking at the current space of math software: TeX and LaTeX, MathJax, R, Wolfram Alpha, GNU Octave, MATLAB, Microsoft Excel, Omnigraffle. Plus decades of bespoke math educational video games (originally distributed on floppy/cd-rom; later online flash games).

Then think about what subdomain of mathematics you want to write software for. (9th grade polynomials, graphing, and algebra? Addition? Times tables?)

I'd also think about who you expect to use the software. (Just you? Teachers? Students?)

My dad used to work in a TV station's meteorology department. He is also a math teacher. He used some of the animation software (running on Irix on SGI O2's at the time, if I remember right) and green screen for weather reports to make math videos for his students, long before YouTube.

I was able to pick up that software and start making animations during a tour I got of the studio. The tools were designed to allow linking objects, paths, and animations in a very intuitive way.

See if you can find a demo of some of those weather animation user interfaces as there is probably good inspiration there.

Do you remember the name of the animation software they used?

“Looking at” R, Matlab and sage alone is easily year worth of work.

I'm imagining something like a graphing calculator where you can define parameter variables that become interactive sliders, or that can be scripted or controlled by animation curves to produce baked animations.

https://www.geogebra.org/

https://www.desmos.com/calculator

I've been using Desmos for a year now, it's great! Waiting for the 3D version.

Although you can write your own 3D renderer inside Desmos...

Like the Manipulate command in Mathematica?: https://reference.wolfram.com/language/tutorial/Introduction...

Probably like Mathematica crossed with After Effects.

If I were you, I would look into writing equation and graphing calculator plugins for an existing animation tool, such as Blender.

Yet another useless and entitled comment. A tool that is very clearly meant for personal use, and is even advertised as such, did not happen to be a well documented library easy for everyone else to use. What a surprise. To me this repo shouldn't be interpreted as anything more than just a sneak peek at what such a library could look like, and we're lucky he even bothered putting it out there after all the nagging. It's frankly embarrassing seeing it get flooded with entry-level questions expecting full guides on how to get started.

"In the end, I ended up coding" — this is what open source does to your brain, I guess.

Honestly, "useless and entitled" kind of hurt my feelings. The title says it's 3Blue1Brown's "animation engine." I'm just relaying my experience with the thing to let people know that working with it won't be all sunshine and roses, if they want to use it, and that it might be nice to put some effort into it if we really want it to be a community tool.

I think we have similar opinions about what the tool is, and what it's not. I just must have not expressed myself in a very clear way. I did spend about two days hacking on this, just to get a basic POC working. But in the end, I couldn't figure out how to put right angle markers on my vectors. I also submitted an issue about vectors getting smaller when the norm was less than 1.

I'm just saying, the title makes it seem like it's a general purpose tool, but it's not.

Yeah, that's what I felt when I poked around it. But at the same time, I don't think it was meant to be anything more than a few hacks he uses to create his own beautiful content. I expect this is the kind of critique I'd get if someone ever tried to use my dotfiles. They work wonderfully, but just for me.

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