This looks interesting, but I can't see myself using it on an ipad or phone. This is something I'd want to use on a desktop, with a keyboard, while multitasking with other programs.
Edit: I'll keep it in the back of my head, and I might try it later.
+1 to this. Would really like to try this out on the desktop.
Looks quite powerful already. With a few more standard probability/ and statistics-related functions I could see this becoming an excellent tool for finance and consulting work.
You should add an "email me when the Mac version is ready" signup form. Because I will forget about this if you don't remind me, but I'm willing to buy as long as the price isn't significantly higher.
If you want to manually email me when it's done my address is in on my profile page.
Will the desktop version have the ability to use functions from third party libraries?
We have a bunch of complicated maths in a java library. At the moment I've got a jruby wrapper around it and using the jruby repl, but it would be awesome if I could use this with it.
Oh interesting. No support for that now, but it should be possible to add. Perhaps shelling out and just reading stdout? Binary interfaces would be harder.
Looks like an interesting halfway house between a text editor and a full-blown CAS like Mathematica (since I have a license, that's what I use as a scratchpad for this kind of thing). It also seems to overlap with Soulver, which is my go-to calculator on iOS.
Cleverly, Calca appears to go a bit further than even MMA by back-filling changed definitions, almost like functional reactive programming. This is neat and something I've wanted to see for a long time.
I'll be buying once I get home to my iPad, but I really want to see the Mac OS version!
Hi I'm the author. I took a lot of inspiration from Soulver. I basically wanted a smarter Soulver with more programming constructs and better treatment of undefined variables. Hope you like it and OS X version will be out in a couple weeks.
I absolutely love Soulver, but I think it's trying to achieve a subtly different aim. Soulver is a lot more focused, and definitely more a calculator (albeit one re-designed for the modern era) than a text editor.
What I'd really like to see is something like this, but with in-line typesetting. Similar to the Markdown editors where when the line is active and you're editing it you see the raw text, but when you move off to another line you see the typeset mathematics. Because at the moment, it's just so much quicker and easier to think with pen and paper when you can actually write and read correct notation, rather than a monospaced-ASCII-fascimile...
Soulver groks magnitudes of bits and bytes, and carries units or denominations over, making it invaluable for quick scalability planning or bandwidth estimates and sharing the templates with teams via Dropbox. Love this tool.
It would be really neat if you could tap a number and drag it left or or right to adjust it's value. Everything would recalculate and you could have a small dialog box out to the side to adjust the increment level of the 'drag adjustment'. An iPhone screen probably wouldn't have room for the dialog box so you could putting it in settings but for iPad it would fit just fine.
I certainly can't speak for others, but my typical use case is projected to be in meetings. Imagine sitting in a room with a bunch of engineers and managers, and someone says something worth checking the math on.
If you're not the lucky dude at the conference room's computer and just happens to have IPython Notebook/LightTable/Excel/`w/e`, then this will be handy. Be the guy who keeps up with the conversation and can check assumptions.
The fact it allows variable names with spaces is just the sweetest syntactic sugar.
It runs a smidge slow on the iPhone, but since that's the tool I have on hand, I'll gladly take a lightweight equation solver like this. (And if the slide-to-change numbers feature gets added, I'll happily buy it again. Twice.)
Glad you like the spaces in names! It's not hard to implement without too much ambiguity. :) There are a few tricks I need to pull to make things like: `if x then y else z` be interpreted correctly.
Fun fact: The slowness is bottlenecked by how fast I can update the text editor - the calculations themselves usually only take 10% of the update time. It's a big area that can be improved.
Interesting. I really had just assumed the iPhone was under-powered (having no idea what the device is really doing in the background). If it can go faster, that would certainly be icing. But over all, I think I'll largely be using it to sketch an idea here or there, and it is plenty fast for that. The slowdown is only noticeable for the included big reference documents. (Which are great - being able to twiddle with the features inside the definitions is now my favorite way to learn.)
Is there anything like this for stats? I remember watching my then girlfriend in the throes of her thesis, having to tweak and re-run a Stata script again and again and again.
Also, for seriously complicated work, maybe a desktop all in one touch screen could be useful, so long as it's oriented more horizontally than vertically.
R + RStudio + Knitr is pretty solid, but more than a bit clunky - write Markdown, intersperse R to your heart's content, and you can execute lines as you see fit.
I have very high hopes for an R + LightTable integration.
R + LightTable would be lovely. As almost everyone else, I use a gross combination of the R GUI (Mac), Emacs, and Sweave.
I am not a huge fan of markdown other than as a "with benefits" convention for text documents, but I see a fair amount of superiority over Sweave/LaTeX for short documents and literate programs.
I see that most people use embedded LaTeX for expressions in various markdown implementations. Is this canonical or is this the result of 'improved' implementations such as Pandoc, etc.?
Btw, OP, you got your $2.99 - royalty from me because I want yet another reason to tell people there is no reason for them to have their laptops open in meetings.
Can you embellish a bit, perhaps enlighten us as to why you continue to use your TI-89? How do you think it compares to this, decidedly different, option? My apologies if you accidentally posted that comment before finishing your thought, but I'm generally used to seeing more effort being put into posts on HN.
Edit: I'll keep it in the back of my head, and I might try it later.