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Comment by calhoun137 | Hacker News Reader

A really great way to learn more about numpy is with Math Inspector[1]. It creates a block coding environment which works with the entire numpy/scipy stack, it also has an interactive 2d and 3d plotting library that updates the functionality in mathplotlib. Also, I made it =) Just spent the past 3 months working day and night and released a massive update a few days ago. Check out the youtube video on the bottom of the page for more in depth information.

[1] https://mathinspector.com/

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Fantastic. Jupyter is a handicap disguised as dataman’s best friend. This is actually intuitive

Thank you!!! I worked so hard on this project, and really appreciate the kind words

Could you elaborate more on Jupyter? I use it almost daily, and despite its warts (such as lack of source control and a lack of explicit dependencies), it's pretty darn useful.

No doubt useful, I just find that it’s failings are whisked away as “you don’t need to worry about source control because it won’t work!” It prevents users from learning things that would make their lives easier because it can’t do those things, it gets them stuck at a local optimum. It’s great for what it’s great for but as soon as you leave its usefulness domain jupyter becomes a burden to integrate even in a simple way.

There are ide plugins to use the jupyter kernels thought. Atoms hydrogen[1] or vscodes Python Support [2] comes to mind. Jetbrain IDEs have similar plugins.

They enable pretty much both package managers and scm without any overhead to speak of.

> 1: https://blog.nteract.io/hydrogen-interactive-computing-in-at...

> 2: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/python/data-science-with-pyth...

There's Pluto for Julia: https://github.com/fonsp/Pluto.jl

You can use it with source control, I do it for about 18 notebooks I use on a daily basis:

https://github.com/kynan/nbstripout

This is quite amazing! I might use it when I give lectures.

How abstracted is the interface? Will there be an API that let's me plug in another language, for instance? I would be incredibly surprised if that is already the case, but I thought it would not hurt to ask ;)

Python is very well suited for being mapped to a block coding environment because it has such a large number of helper functions which enumerate all the things each module/object/function can do.

I have considered doing a similar project for javascript, but I had assumed it would require an entire new codebase for each programming language given how different every language is under the hood.

Great project - you're on the front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25978962

getting on the front page like this was quite unexpected and has completely made my day =) =) =)

Dude, this is a GREAT concept!

There's always been that extra little step of going from working code to pretty graphs/animations that acts as a barrier to entry to where I almost never do that part. It's not that it's hard, it's just always a PITA with a bunch of required boilerplate and always requires that I dig through the API.

This streamlines that process in a way I didn't think would be possible.

That said.... maybe I'm doing something really dumb, but it's basically unusable for me right now on windows since every time I type the letter "d" it just highlights the line in the interpreter instead of typing the letter. I see this issue has been mentioned already in github though.

I'd love to keep playing around with this some more. I'm also SUUUUUPER curious about doing some GIS integrations using the qgis python libraries.

oh whoops! I saw that error earlier and forgot to fix it. The idea was to replicate sublime text's feature for highlighting words with ctrl+d, but there is some kind of error for detecting when ctrl is being used as a modifier key in windows. I'm going to fix that later today and upload a new build. Thanks for the heads up

EDIT: problem should be fixed now. I have just uploaded a new windows build to the website and pushed the changes to master on GitHub. Tested it on my windows machine and it looks like the fix is working properly. Re-downloading the installer file and installing again should resolve the issue.

I really want more interfaces like this, with diagram representations of source code, and convenient and interactive plotting. Thank you!

Can you speak to why a scatter plot and a line plot are distinguished using `(xs, ys, zs)` and `[xs, ys, zs]`?

Great question! The plotting library is it's own stand alone module, and there is a `plot` function which accepts an arbitrary number of arguments. This is how the app is able to plot multiple graphs at the same time.

Using tuple/list for points/lines makes it easy to plot points and lines at the same time, with a single function call, without any nasty keyword arguments.

For example

>>> plot((0,0), (1,1), [(0,0),(1,1)])

The other reason was it makes the code a lot nicer in some places. I tried using a keyword argument at first and there was a lot of additional logic to keep track of.

wow this is fantastic. not just the product itself but the website. I can tell you put a lot of love into this project and I'm downloading it as I type this.

No love for linux? :(

There is! I didn't build and codesign the linux version yet (just ran out of steam and needed a few days of rest), but I set up everything in a VM and got it working on my mac through x11.

If you follow the instructions in the install.sh[1] script (which is for doing VM testing with Vagrant), it should hopefully be simple to install from the source code on your system.

https://github.com/MathInspector/MathInspector/blob/master/i...

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