Leandro wrote...
Performance is only an issue in some branches of Mathematics, like algorithmic, complexity or numerical analysis.
Mainly I was alluding to extremely high-end applications, such as fluid dynamics, where one is going to have lots of other problems in dealing with arcane supercomputer architectures and massive storage requirements, etc... But day to day engineering stuff, things you would actually use during initial design work ( and not advanced analysis ) are often well within the computational abilities of something like Smalltalk. My recollection is that most of my undergraduate FORTRAN programs ran in just a few minutes... I'm sure that Smalltalk could handle that with todays computers ( I was an undergraduate a long time ago...). In fact, I gambled my Master's thesis on that and was rewarded with the insight that the ability to interact with a problem was as valuable as the ability to implement it's solution. I found Smalltalk ( V/286, actually, on a 486/DX33 ) to be a very good match to my problem, developing an algorithm for 2D unstructured mesh generation. ( I needed the mesh for the flow solver, one thing led to another, etc ... ).
We are not interested in doing long calculations, we are using Squeak to think and understand mathematical concepts.
In much of my undergraduate engineering work, we were primarily doing one-off programs meant to hone our skills in developing numerical software to meet our own needs. These were the end products of having first learned the mathematical, physical, and engineering principles ( probably in separate coursework ) rather than an integrated learning experience in which one literally builds upon previous work. I'm very glad to hear of your work in this area- I know there are a lot of Statics and Dynamics engineering students out there who would benefit enormously from having a highly interactive "textbook", rather than those pages of cut-and-dried vectors calculus formulas that I had ( too much abstraction is not a good thing early in the learning process - pages of equations quickly become nothing but pages of equations, with all physical meaning lost somewhere in the dazed confusion of too many courses ).
The important point is that Squeak and Morphic fit exactly in our work. (BTW, I'm just beginning to write my manuscripts and classroom notes in BookMorphs, and I am discovering the beauty and power of having mathematical objects living around the same pages where the definitions and theorems they illustrate are written. It's exciting.)
I should think so! I'd love to see these!
les
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