From 1ca7dc6b3834502a54c8eb1c7f32025d38235735 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Sacha Chua Date: Sun, 21 Dec 2025 19:48:23 -0500 Subject: add discussion to calc --- 2025/talks/calc.md | 35 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 35 insertions(+) (limited to '2025/talks') diff --git a/2025/talks/calc.md b/2025/talks/calc.md index b0172603..63d4ecd4 100644 --- a/2025/talks/calc.md +++ b/2025/talks/calc.md @@ -17,6 +17,41 @@ About the speaker: Christopher Howard is a simulator technician in Fairbanks, Alaska, and a GNU Emacs user for a little over a decade. My technical interests are focused on analog computing and modeling with differential equations. +## Discussion / notes + +- Q: How sophisticated an ordinary differential equation solver would + be useful? There are some C libraries one ould try to build upon, + but there are many corner cases, stiff, non-stiff is one + categorization, but an explicit Runge Kutta would work for many + non-stiff equations + - A: I don't really have any opinions right now about the + approximation methods. For me, what I really want is one of + those old style languages where you basically just type in the + list of differential equations and don't have to do any other + computer programming, or know the details of another programming + language. I played around a bit with python-dda, though it has + some deficiencies. There are some graphical free software + programs where you do this sort of thing with blocks, but they + all depend on Java which is problematic in Guix. +- Q: Is there a way to see the input of a custom function? E.g. if you + forget the order of f and C in the example you showed + - A: Let's see... there is calc-user-define-edit. One calc also + view the file where the definitions are stored, though that is a + somewhat obscure format. +- Q: Have you tried interacting with calc via org-babel (first thing + that came to mind when you said that you'd like to annotate + values)? Any thoughts on that? How about rendering gnuplots on org + documents via calc? + - A: I played around with org-babel a few years ago but haven't + really had any need or interest in it of late. +- Q: Who is in charge of calc development anyway? Is there an active maintainer? +- Nice talk. +- Thanks for the cool talk! I've been using Calc quite a lot recently for linear algebra work. I also use it quite often for unit conversion. There's a package called calc-currency which is very useful but unfortunately does not seem to be maintained anymore. +- I'm going to have to rewatch this talk. +- thanks for your talk! Calc strikes me as one of those really powerful things I should spend time learning a little more about one of these days =) +- calc is suprisingly good at datetime math. +- I mostly use it for that and unit conversion. I don't do any fancy calculus like lispmacs did in his talk. +- Funny, I'm studying computer engineering and just a few weeks ago I'd decided to properly learn how to use calc myself. [[!inline pages="internal(2025/info/calc-after)" raw="yes"]] -- cgit v1.2.3