Submitter here,<p>I am a long time everyday reader of HN but I have never posted or really commented. I am a structural engineer with a few years of work in the space program. I have spent a great deal of time building something that I think can redefine the way we do engineering and I am close to finished with an initial version.<p>I am extremely nervous about posting this, but I would love to hear what everyone thinks. (There is a video in the overview section)<p>Thanks
As a mech engineer doing mostly structural work these days, you are definitely solving an important problem, one which I both witness and experience first hand every single day. Excel is used a lot, but it's error prone and sucks for communicating your work (formulas and logic is hidden). Plus, trying to track down the latest version of some calculation someone did 10 years ago, digging down 29 subfolders on the common drive, ugh.<p>I do like projects like Jupyter (I used IPNB a lot during my masters), but it seems like 95% of my fellow engineers feel like python/julia/even matlab are "too complicated for something excel does". Which I disagree with (ever tried extracting eigenvalues in excel? or simply plotting a hisogram?), but eh. Programming is also less visual/graphic, which is one plus of excel (colors, fonts, layout of a spreadsheet do help with processing information)<p>I can't say if your solution is "the one". It's too complex a problem for that. But my personal feeling is you're tackling the right issues at the right angle. As good as your product is though, getting traction is going to be the hard part, by far. I wish you the best, and certainly hope I get to use your product some day.
If this has trouble getting traction in engineering as originally designed... Please pivot!<p>I watched the document section of your introduction video and was struck by how elegantly it would solve my needs for a blogging platform. I may even try using it for that without a pivot.
I think this is very interesting, although I'm still trying to understand it. So excuse my ignorance, but how does this differ from open source projects such as Jupyter, Sage, and JuliaBox?