What version to use?

[Quazoosl]

Hello all,

For the company I work for I'm looking for a program for basic engineering calculations. The main thread where I ask what program would be best suited for the job can be found here. Since the reply's I got in the main thread are quite general and I'd like some mathcad secific answers I've started this thread.

I have some experience with a very early MathCad version (2001i) and I've tested MathCad prime 1.0 for a short while. In general I really like the way units can easily be converted and calculated with. In 2001i I especially liked that (once I knew what keys to use) I could really work fast and keep on typing formulas. Whilst I really liked the speed in which it could be used, the thing I missed in 2001i was a bit of intuitive design and ease of use.

When I used Prime 1.0 in my opinion they really tried to copy the microsoft way of interacting with the software in stead of making it as intuitive as advertised. Yes it looks good but working with quantity for example names I found to be really really timeconsuming. When I wanted to enter a single quantity or a several quantitys into an equation like F[sub]1[/sub]=10*N in 2001i I only had to type"F.1[spacebar]:10N" if my memory is correct. With mathcad prime I had to do something like type "F", select subscript with mouse, type "1", deselect subscript with mouse and so on. If there is a faster way it surely feels like the developers tried really hard to hide it from me...

Does anyone know if Prime 2.0 has improved on this? Perhaps we should be using a later pre-prime version like 15? I'm beginning to doubt it is still being sold since I can't find it on their website.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.


Since I'm not a native speaker I'd appreciate feedback on my (British) English

 

[IRstuff]

Prime 1 is fairly crippled from an MC perspective, simply because it wasn't a complete port of MC. Prime 2 is probably substantially closer to the overall capabilities of MC15.

The big question is what you really mean by "basic engineering calculations." That could mean anything from just a simple scientific calculator capability to running PDEs and ODEs and programming.

TTFN
faq731-376

 

[zdas04]

I bought MathCad 15 and found it to be so buggy that I scurried back to V14. That is what I still use, and don't expect to look at Prime again until I see some comments on eng-tips.com that it works and is reasonably usable (I use the "." subscript format for every single variable to keep myself from redefining a meter as m:Vol * Density). V14 seems to be rock solid and I don't get "updates" (spelled "intrusive crap that fixes stuff I don't use") anymore. A couple of weeks ago I ported it to a 64 bit machine running Windows 7 Pro and so far it seems to run the same as it did on 32 bit Windows XP Pro.

What little I know about Prime, it sounds like MathType (which I use in Word and PowerPoint and pretty much hate the "click, click, click" user interface) and a giant step backwards.

David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering

"Belief" is the acceptance of an hypotheses in the absence of data.
"Prejudice" is having an opinion not supported by the preponderance of the data.
"Knowledge" is only found through the accumulation and analysis of data.

 

[Quazoosl]

@IRstuff: Basic calculations for me lies somewhere in between. I know we don't need the full power of the program, but it should be more than a scientific calculator. Most of the calculations we do don't require any integration or deriviation, but they tend to get quite large. Most engineers here do these calculations with a calculator and write them down, or use excel. This way I feel it's to easy to make mistakes and to hard to spot them.

@zdas04: From my experience with prime and pre-prime I couldn't agree with you more.

 

[IRstuff]

I'm still pretty happy with M11, which predates the complete code rewrite that fubarred M12. Of course, it's missing a bunch of unit conversions that would be occasionally nice to have, and plotting still sucks (for which there is Excel).

TTFN
faq731-376

 

[IFRs]

I'm very happy with M15 latest update and have been trying hard to use Prime 2 with too much frustration for my liking. So I gave up.

 

[excognito]

M15 (which is effectively a boosted M14) is fine for general use. Prime isn't really ready yet, although rumourspace indicates that Prime 3 will be a lot better than '2.

 

[IRstuff]

While Prime is taking a while to get to a point of full capability, it is a more thought out process than what occurred with M12, wherein the entire program was rewritten in one fell swoop, resulting in chaos and bugs galore.

TTFN
faq731-376

 

[Pederator]

Guys, what do you think about M13 comparing to other "classic" versions, such as M11 or M14?

 

[IRstuff]

M13 has more features than M11, but M14 is less buggy.

TTFN
faq731-376

 

[jhardy1]

M14 is the most "mature" and (almost) bug-free version that I have encountered.

Prime 1 was a work in progress; Prime 2 seems to me to be almost ready for "prime-time" use (excuse the pun). I really like the output and presentation, but I think it may still be missing a couple of key tools for "power users". For example, several of my most complex M14 worksheets simply haven't transferred across to Prime 2 successfully. It is going to take a lot of effort to migrate them, and I'm honestly not sure it will be worth the effort for me. If / when my company moves over to Prime 2, I suspect I will need to keep M15 installed as well for my legacy worksheets, but I would do most (if not all) of my new work in Prime 2.

If you are coming in cold, with no library of "legacy" worksheets, I think the vast majority of new users would be very happy with Prime 2. If you are an existing "power user", and / or have a lot of complex legacy files to support going forward, M14 (or M15) might be the safest bet.

http://julianh72.blogspot.com

 

[IRstuff]

PTC is currently blogging Mathcad Prime 3:

http://blogs.ptc.com/2012/08/03/an-inside-look-at-mathcad-prime-3-0-part-2

so that's something...

TTFN
faq731-376

 

[Pederator]

Since Prime is written in a managed code, it is not possible to develop user dlls, therefore it is useless for me. The only good feature of Prime is a return to dynamic unit checking. This is my opinion about MP posted on the other forum:
"For me Mathcad Prime is a trash, even apart from the user efi issues. I had a short adventure with it, and don't want to have anything to do with "this thing". Wrong way change direction. It even looks worse (candy style)! In my opinion PTC changed the target from origin (engineers, higher education and PhD students, scientists, professionals) to kids and secondary school students. Yeah, that sounds stupid, but it fits to the actual profile of this software. They try to do Mathcad more idiot-resist, but it lost its "identity"."

I haven't change my mind

 

[IRstuff]

"In my opinion PTC changed the target from origin (engineers, higher education and PhD students, scientists, professionals) to kids and secondary school students"

I doubt that; Mathsoft blew a bunch money developing Studyworks, which went nowhere, and PTC acquired Mathsoft as a result of that and a couple of other major blunders. Expansion into the college market, on the other hand is almost mandatory, to counter Mathworks' massive penetration into that same market. Additionally, regardless of how simple the interface is, there are plenty of examples of postings on the PTS Mathcad forums that demonstrate that even engineers often cannot handle the program.

Again, I think that PTC made a mistake by not allowing the solve block to part of Express; you run the 30-day demo as a freshman, and by the time you're a senior, you've already used almost all of MATLAB, and you'll barely remember that Mathcad had all these features, because you long abandoned it for MATLAB, which gave you more functionality.

TTFN
faq731-376

 

[jhardy1]

IRstuff said: "PTC is currently blogging Mathcad Prime 3"

Maybe by the time it gets to Mathcad Prime 12, it will again have all of the tools and features that we all know and love!

http://julianh72.blogspot.com

 

[IRstuff]

Even numbered versions of Mathcad have had a checkered history.

From what I can tell, MP3 will probably exceed any version of the original versions, including 14/15. Note that MP2 includes DOE, Signal Processing, Data Analysis, and Image Processing directly in the program, unlike previous versions where they were extension libraries.

TTFN
faq731-376

 

[Quazoosl]

Most people that asked something like: "will prime 3 have blablabla feature" on the blog, got a very politicly correct response that came down to: "no not in this version". At least they are being honest about it.

I'm running a trial version of MC15 now and when I try to open files from 2001i it seems to have lost some functionality. It probably has gained a lot of functionality aswell but I expect some features didn't survive the code overhaul from 11 to 12 that IRstuff mentioned. I know what I want, I know 2001i could do it, but the error messages keep telling me it can't be done. In the calculations in question I'm using ^n and I've defined n:=1.4 earlyer. When I replace the ^n with ^1.4 it seems to work though.

About Prime: I don't feel like waiting for a third version for it to work properly. If they can't do it in two, I doubt they can do it in three. I'm still convinced that Prime 1.0 should have never been released. It makes it hard to take PTC seriously. I think I've found the answer to the question of what version I should use: none. I thought there wouldn't be a serious alternative but Maple seems to have met all of my requirements with the greatest ease.

Thank you all for your input, heading on now.

Quazoosl out.

 

[Pederator]

"In my opinion PTC changed the target from origin (engineers, higher education and PhD students, scientists, professionals) to kids and secondary school students" - this was of course exaggerated, i just wanted to say that the center of gravity was moved, generaly speaking lowered.
PTC is now focused on the business market - sheets are to be more readible (e.g given-find block is now explicitly described), nice looking, with many colours etc. But the simplification of MP went too far, the software is heavy and even less stable than the old versions. Apparently PTC wants to develop math text formatting tool, instead of calculational tool.
One of the best features of the old MC versions was possibility for creating user defined libraries. This will not be longer supported. Are you kidding me?!

 

[Pederator]

I forgot to mention, that writing programs in Prime is also more time consuming.

 

[IRstuff]

"About Prime: I don't feel like waiting for a third version for it to work properly."

That is not strictly correct. Each version of Prime works "properly" in the sense that no functionality that was in the design of that particularly failed to work; they simply did not include the functionality that they added to each subsequent version. Nonetheless, I agree that P1 was not a capable product in its feature set, which appears to be mostly corrected in P2

The only math functionality addition for P3 appear to relate to some matrix decomposition functions and DLL capability.

TTFN
faq731-376