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I use spotlight a lot, but never for calculations. I’ll have to try that out. The ability to use variables, math functions, lists, loops, and completion in Pyt
by todd8 7y ago
I use spotlight a lot, but never for calculations. I’ll have to try that out.
The ability to use variables, math functions, lists, loops, and completion in Python will likely keep me using it as my basic calculator. Although I need to figure out a way to edit my REPL history to fix typos better.
- coldtea 7y ago>In the past when I needed a calculator on someone’s Mac, I just started Python in a terminal and typed in expressions to be evaluated (...) The ability to use variables, math functions, lists, loops, and completion in Python will likely keep me using it as my basic calculator. Why do you do math on random people's laptops?
- todd8 7y agoTech support for family, friends, coworkers.
- coldtea 7y agoI do all that too, it rarely, if ever, involves math. Installing this, formatting that, removing some virus, installing some hardware, configuring the OS or a program yes.
- todd8 7y agoYes, a lot of the tech support falls into your enumeration, but I was Chief Scientist at a company for over six years, an OS Architect at IBM for five years and subsequently have done years of part time consulting at a number of startups. It's not unusual to be in someone's office or even having coffee with my daughter (she studying engineering) when some question that involves simple calculations comes up, things like "Is this algorithm warranted given the data set size?". One of my degrees is in math and perhaps this leads me to think quantitatively about many questions. In my own office I use perhaps a dozen machines. Servers running FreeBSD, OpenBSD, or Linux. Linux, Windows, and Mac desktops and laptops. Few are actually set up as Python development machines (those of course have recent Python installed), but having a ubiquitous tool for simple calculations (or even short scripts) is quite handy on all of the others. My work might not be typical: I have been programming for over half a century and I started making use of Python for simple programs in the Python 1.2 time frame around 20 years ago. I'm not really a Python developer, but I appreciate it as a useful tool--even as a keyboard driven calculator.
- Redoubts 7y agoWhat completion? The stock REPL doesn’t have that.
- todd8 7y agoI was referring to readline-style completion (as in GNU Readline) as is also found in the bash shell. You're right that the stock REPL doesn't have IDE style completion.