rec files are not configuration, they are just a very simple and basic way of representing tabular data, very similar to a CSV. But it uses lines to separate columns and records, making it much simpler to add and edit records by hand, differently from CSV

recutils is aimed at database rather than config use-cases

With all the integrated standard functions Mathematica is such an incredible tool. We really need an open source version of it. Even if we implement only 10% of the features it would be already incredible useful.

I started working on an implementation in Rust called Woxi (https://github.com/ad-si/Woxi) and I hope to find some contributors, as it is such a gargantuan task!

Here's a 10% clone of Mathematica - https://mathics.org/

Maxima is the clone. I remember using it 20 years ago. very nice.

It's more like both Mathematica and Maxima are clones of the original MACSYMA.

Maxima is based on the DOE (Department of Energy) fork of MACSYMA.

Maxima is a similar CAS, but it's not a clone of Mathematica like Mathics aims to be.

Maxima, despite its shortcomings, is a great tool for symbolic computation.

This reminded me of one of the greatest posts in the history of the internet, and I am devastated to report that it no longer exists: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6516114

I've writing one myself in Go the past few months just to learn the way CAS internals work. Got about 300 symbols working to varying degree. Complex numbers almost working. Basic rule system. Various algebra simplifications. Still trying to figure out how to do Factor as it is pretty math intensive. No graphical output, just to the terminal for now. Using Claude models also to learn AI programming and help with so of the math concepts.

imo you should implement double pass for the evaluator. using pest tokens in the functions etc makes it gard to implement also makes it slow and not optimizable

Yes agreed! I already started implementing it for some subset. Hope to get it finished soon.

This works really well, great work! How many MB is the whole bundle?

I basically did the same thing a few weeks ago! =) => https://flatcv.ad-si.com

It will be interesting to see what you did differently!

Nice. Any plans to add support for affine transformations and perspective transformation (warp)?

Definitely on the todo list, but since it is only a side project, I don't know when I'll get to it. Any contributions would be highly appreciated! =)

Reason (https://reasonml.github.io/) is the JS like syntax for OCaml. ReScript is a fork that explicitly removes the connection to OCaml and focuses on JavaScript output.

yes, correct, but ReasonML is abandoned, while there is still some traction in Rescript and it offers the same type safety.

PHP getting a pipe operator with ways to implement a Maybe Monad was definitely not on my 2025 bingo card.

But any changes making mainstream languages more functional are highly welcome! It’s just more ergonomic than imperative code.

I’ve had all my personal projects in Dropbox for years without any problems.

I tried the same with Google Drive at work and had lots of issues, but recently it seems to have stabilized.

I think it would be better to use a an existing programming language for CAD so that the LLM has more training data already.

Therefore im working on LuaCAD (https://github.com/ad-si/LuaCAD), which is a Lua frontend for OpenSCAD.

I'm working on https://ad-si.github.io/LuaCAD/

LuaCAD is a scripting library which uses OpenSCAD as engine to create 2D and 3D models. The OpenSCAD language itself is quite limited and has several issues and Lua is much better suited for the job!

So if you're interested in programmatic CAD, please check it out!

My new go-to language for any calculations is https://numbat.dev.

It’s a statically typed programming language for scientific computations with first class support for physical dimensions and units.

Great ergonomics and a pleasure to use!