Great work! I like how well considered the design is. This calculator takes a point in the design space with text input, equation rendering, a grapher, and Big Int/Floats for number representation.
I wonder if the author considered an input method where keypresses translate directly into a rendered equation? Symbolab kind of does this, so instead of writing an expression in some functional style and seeing its rendered output, I can directly manipulate the rendered equation with the keyboard.
The other point the author makes about discoverability of operators like sqrt and cbrt, I feel that you could circumvent it by introducing a semantic search feature for operators. For example, typing "square root" would display a list of suggestions for operators that match that, like an IDE.
The last question I have is if the author has looked at libraries like Calcium (https://fredrikj.net/calcium/) or the work that went into the Android calculator recently (https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3385412.3386037). They use exact arithmetic with computable real/complex numbers. It might serve as a cleaner abstraction that switching between different BigNum representations yourself.
>I wonder if the author considered an input method where keypresses translate directly into a rendered equation?
Personally, I don't like such systems, because I always end up moving the cursor up/down/left/right trying to add parenthesis here and there; so I am not considering adding it. I really feel better with fast, raw text input.
>The other point the author makes about discoverability of operators like sqrt and cbrt, I feel that you could circumvent it by introducing a semantic search feature for operators.
Indeed, I can add this kind of things by adding keywords to the documentation items. Currently I rather tried to narrow the search results, but I can expand them a little with some experience on what the users really needed.
>The last question I have is if the author has looked at libraries like Calcium (...) or the work that went into the Android calculator recently
I don't know Calcium, and I am not a smartphone user, so Android is beyond my little world :-)
Calcium seems very interesting on its own, but it is unlikely that I can use it in Chalk. I already built my own abstractions to do everything low-level related to bit manipulation and garbage bits. Adding a little formal calculus will certainly be home-made either.
However, like I did with ARBLIB, I can also cherrypick just a subset of the library that would exactly fix one problem or give some precious help even on a single feature. I will have a deeper look at its API and how it can mix up with the current Chalk design. Thanks for pointing it out !
I wonder if the author considered an input method where keypresses translate directly into a rendered equation? Symbolab kind of does this, so instead of writing an expression in some functional style and seeing its rendered output, I can directly manipulate the rendered equation with the keyboard.
The other point the author makes about discoverability of operators like sqrt and cbrt, I feel that you could circumvent it by introducing a semantic search feature for operators. For example, typing "square root" would display a list of suggestions for operators that match that, like an IDE.
The last question I have is if the author has looked at libraries like Calcium (https://fredrikj.net/calcium/) or the work that went into the Android calculator recently (https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3385412.3386037). They use exact arithmetic with computable real/complex numbers. It might serve as a cleaner abstraction that switching between different BigNum representations yourself.