On 04/04/2022 09.45, Ethan Furman wrote:
On 4/3/22 11:52, Brian McCall wrote:
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The old engineering disciplines- mine (civil engineering), structural, electrical, etc- are the next frontier in the "software eats the world" revolution, and they desperately need a language with native units support. I was just on an interview call yesterday for a senior engineer role at a large multinational earth works engineering firm and we spent 15 minutes talking about software and what we see coming down the road when it comes to the need for our discipline to grow in its software creation capabilities.
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It's not only 'engineering'. Although, the archetypical story ("learning opportunity") is that of the space-craft software partly developed in Europe and partly 'in-Imperial', resulting in a catastrophic navigation error... Many (many) years ago, I was part of a team developing a replacement Inventory/Stock Control system. When 'problems' arose in the 'old system', rather than fixing, the 'solution' was sometimes to rip-out the problematic functionality - the new system will be ready 'soon'*. This resulted in 'consequences'! One day, as the only prog who could work on the mainframe's overnight-batch processes and the mini-computers running the warehouses, I was asked to 'put back' the code dealing with pack-sizes. Once done, a stock-take was necessary. I went out to a warehouse to do some 'live testing' and was shown some of the "problems we're facing". Sure-enough, a quick call-around and a back-of-an-envelope calculation revealed that we had more than sufficient stock - every man, woman, and child in the country could have enjoyed a fresh toothbrush, every day, for several years. Yes, they'd been ordering quantities in one pack-size, whereas the supplier was delivering something (much) larger! * see also 'the sound of deadlines': https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/douglas_adams_134151 You wouldn't believe it - have interrupted typing here to receive a package. However, the clothing delivered is NOT the size ordered... Recently, I've been struggling with graphics and thus using both Cartesian- and Polar-coordinates. Worse are vectors (in both) which cannot be easily distinguished. Just coping with the math is (more than) enough for this limited brain, without also keeping-track of the unit/convention! How about 4/5/2022? Is that tomorrow's date or almost one-month away?
How old are you? 35 years How much do you weigh? 300 kg What temperature do you cook bread at? 350 F
These look like input prompts, and responses. Do you want to be able to accept different temporal formats, different measures of weight, and different temperature units - from the same input interaction? How about writing sample Python code to accomplish this, eg some_meaningful_identifier_here = input("How old are you? ") or are you thinking: class Weight(): ... weight = Weight(input(etc)) or some combination thereof, or another approach, or ...? -- Regards, =dn