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by awhitty 1106 days ago
I once mentioned Desmos to a college friend who was teaching high school math. This was the first and one of the only times I’ve seen someone express true glee about a software product. They literally shouted, “I love Desmos!” at the dinner table. Kudos to the team for building a product that teachers love that much. Teachers need all the help they can get.

I’m so curious about how their graphing calculator and their geometric construction tools work. I’ve spent marginal amounts of time researching their stack, and it appears to be custom software. If anyone’s familiar with writing about how these systems are built (particularly the display side of things), I’d appreciate some links or titles!
3 comments
xeonmc 1106 days ago
I always link this whenever the need arises to showcase desmos’ general-purpose computation prowess: https://www.desmos.com/calculator/vjnhlumjiw
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jansan 1106 days ago
Desmos is a true gem. It took me a while to understand how great the graphing calculator really is. There is also GeoGebra, which has similar functionality and I always thought it is just a rebranded Desmos, but they seem to exists independently.
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ReleaseCandidat 1106 days ago
GeoGebra is actually way older (about 10 years?) and has been a master thesis. I didn't know that it has been acquired by Byju's. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoGebra

Sources, under the GPLv3 (code) or Creative Commons (documentation): https://github.com/orgs/geogebra/repositories?type=all

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masfuerte 1106 days ago
I was at school with the CTO of GeoGebra in the 80s. He released his first geometry app in the early 90s, but I don't know if the current product owes anything to his early software.
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murkle 1106 days ago
Not really, it was in (very bad) C++ and GeoGebra is in Java. A couple of good ideas made it across (and hopefully none of the mistakes :)

PS Hi!

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dheera 1106 days ago
I wrote FooPlot around the same time (2007). Ad revenue supplemented my PhD salary by quite a bit, though later on I couldn't keep up with Desmos as 1 person. The website's been down since AWS phased out EC2 classic instances and I was lazy to move it. But the code for the core library is still here, including the equation parsing which is quite similar to TFA. It's written in 2007-level JavaScript, so this could probably be a lot cleaner now.

https://github.com/dheera/fooplot

    git clone https://github.com/dheera/fooplot
    cd fooplot
    your-favorite-browser sample.html
It should support mouse panning and scroll wheel zooming.
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