81–90 of 140 posts
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Some of us (mathematics side) still actually work on paper with calculators. Most of the job is thinking which tooling doesn’t necessarily improve.
> Most of the job is thinking which tooling doesn’t necessarily improve yet you use paper and calculator.
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yes a lot of people love them, but nobody's actually coming up with anything I can't do in python...
You can do everything in Python. But perhaps it is not the best tool for every job. This is similar to programming language discussions: any programming language can be discredited by saying "but I can do all that in assembly/C/whatever". Yes, you can, but perhaps there are better ways to do it.
for the engineering calculators, it seems the advantage is that some people learnt to use them in school and really love using them? that's great, I'm tempted to look into them myself, because it does sound cool to have a small device that does that sort of thing while I'm reading a book. but the truth is that for me, both at work and at home, my laptop is never more than 5 seconds away from showing me a repl, so maybe I'm not the target audience.
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>> Incidentally, many young people (yes, I know how that sounds) do not know how useful a good engineering calculator can be and do not want to learn how to use one. They are missing out. Yes, there is a steep learning curve, but the rewards are significant if you do any amount of calculation in your hobby or work. No, this is not replaced by typing "python" (or "bc", or anything else, really) at your command prompt.…
I'm a calculator nut who has had many fancy TI (like the Voyage 200) and HP calculators (yes RPN) including the SwissMicro reproductions. The ONLY benefit to these tools that I can surmise is basically that they are a physical device for scientists or others in the lab or field and not in front of a computer. For any kind of data work I've seen, Excel, R, Python, Mathematica, or Matlab are all vastly superior. They a…
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> It's kind of like with gyms: what you get is what the market wants, and since the market doesn't know much, you get gyms full of useless exercise machines, because that's what people think a good gym should have. I'm curious: what should a good gym have?
Squat rack, barbell+weights and bench as a minimum, bonus points for a pull-up bar and bars for triceps dips. Most machines in gyms are either mostly useless, or actually detrimental to your health and fitness.
The 48G was a really good calculator, but only after loading additional software. The HP50g that came much later is better in every respect, except possibly for the smaller "ENTER" key (and people used to 48G will have to change some habits and possibly redefine some keys…). Incidentally, many young people (yes, I know how that sounds) do not know how useful a good engineering calculator can be and do not want to lea…
TBH TI-89 titanium is a better engineering calculator since the UI is way better. I have both a HP50G and a TI-89 titanium and I've done way more useful engineering work on the TI-89 titanium just because it's so much easier and accessible. Also of course, BASIC is a lot easier than reverse polish lisp for making some quick scripts. Also I will add, there are known symbolic math issues on the HP50G due to the CAS sys…
However, keystroke programming a calculator, where you can still somewhat do simple loops with goto-like constructs when needed, strikes the right balance for the limited UI of a calculator
So something like the HP 15C is nice.
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> No, this is not replaced by typing "python" (or "bc", or anything else, really) at your command prompt. Why?
Built in algebra system. Mathematica is nice. Also very expensive.
Here's a simple example from their documentation: https://education.ti.com/en/customer-support/knowledge-base/...
Using the Python repl doesn't display nice math as far as I know (let me know if there's a way to make it so it), as you'd have in an environment for doing symbolic math (eg. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=integrate+sin+x+dx+from... )
Another thing if I remember correctly one could do is something like 3_ft*3_ft>_m^2 to convert 9 square feet in square meters, and do things like keep units throughout a calculation as a quick check that the calculator input is sane.
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Some of us (mathematics side) still actually work on paper with calculators. Most of the job is thinking which tooling doesn’t necessarily improve.
> Most of the job is thinking which tooling doesn’t necessarily improve yet you use paper and calculator.
You don't need the calculator to do the final sums until you've done all of the work gathering all of the data that needs to be calculated. It doesn't mean the calculator wasn't needed, just that it's only needed for one thing not every step along the way.
This wasn't the gotcha you think it was