Ask HN: Software Tools for Engineers and Scientists?

7 points by raizinho 7y ago ↗ HN

"The Coming Software Apocalypse" [0] is the article that most affected my view of what I want to work on. This quote sums it up:

"In a recent essay, Victor implored professional software developers to stop pouring their talent into tools for building apps like Snapchat and Uber. 'The inconveniences of daily life are not the significant problems,' he wrote. Instead, they should focus on scientists and engineers - as he put it to me, 'these people that are doing work that actually matters, and critically matters, and using really, really bad tools.' Exciting work of this sort, in particular a class of tools for 'model-based design,' was already underway, he wrote, and had been for years, but most programmers knew nothing about it."

So engineers, scientists, analysts, and researchers of Hacker News, which software tools do you wish existed?

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/09/saving-the-world-from-code/540393/

1 comment

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ThePhysicist 7y ago ↗

During my PhD I built a graphical “IDE” for performing scientific experiments and controlling lab equipment using Python. It features a Matlab/ Jupyter-like code editor and various graphical frontends for lab equipment and data acquisition.

It was my first large Python project and far from perfect but it has “spread” to several research labs and my former colleagues keep improving it, so I’m happy having created it :)

An old version can be found here:

https://github.com/adewes/pyview