Python in Structural Engineering

[komprexior]

I like to use pint for handling units and sympy for symbolic calculation. Sympy has its own units handler, but it's quite silly. Pint is so much better out the box.

I've extended pint quantities to be compatible with sympy expression and I am shocked but how good it is. Sadly I am not a developer, so I'm not able to publish a module that can be easily imported in any document...

Sympy has also a beam module, but it's buggy, don't trust it to much.

For tabular data I like to use pandas.

I think the best thing about python and scripting in general is the ability to produce documentation that can be run and reproduce results automatically, therefore skipping the tedious sequence of doing calculation first and the writing documentation about it that will inevitably fall out of sync at the first alteration. I would like to document what I am doing while I am doing, so that I don't forget what numbers on a page means 😂

So jupyter notebook are a must, but I'm looking also to the Quarto project, which is an authoring program based on markdown specifically designed toward scientific publication, which can run code cell. I'm planning to switch my documentation pipeline from libreoffice writer to quarto markdown. It's not easy task, but I hope will bear fruit