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He has not forgotten the face of his father :) In a similar vein, my father came from a generation a little after the commenters to where he used HP calculator
by 7thaccount 3y ago
He has not forgotten the face of his father :)
In a similar vein, my father came from a generation a little after the commenters to where he used HP calculators in college and later got an HP15c when he graduated. I bought one of the re-released ones and learned to use it just to have a better understanding of the engineering culture he came from. Those old calculators were stack based (RPN) and programmable in a day when practically nobody had a personal computer, so you could often do your assignments on it, instead of waiting in line to do it in Fortran. I think he lucked out and fully missed the punch card era to where they had terminals by that point. The manuals on the HP15c were also fantastic and had lots of example problems like a mini textbook.
- jacquesm 3y agoThat was the line I was thinking of. You're well primed to try your hand at Forth or Factor if you understand RPN.
- 7thaccount 3y agoI've played with both over the years! Excellent advice though.
- jacquesm 3y agoThey're a fun branch on the programming tree. I've tried to nibble a bit from all of them to see what's available and there were a couple that really altered my way of thinking, the lambda calculus inspired minimal programming languages, the Prolog/Erlang branch and the FORTH derived branch. All of those offer fascinating insights into what it means to compute.
- 7thaccount 3y agoAgreed. The APL branch has been my favorite so far. I've looked at a bunch of weird ones like Forth, Lisp, APL, prolog, Haskell, Smalltalk, and many others. I keep going back to Python though. It's overall environment of language, libraries, free, open source...etc seem to firm a nice optimal point despite several drawbacks.
- jacquesm 3y agoYes, Python is the Swiss army knife of programming now. It's in many ways unfortunate but you can't beat the fact that just about any algorithm you can think of is probably available in an optimized form if you need it, with HW acceleration to boot. I use Anaconda to keep the gremlins at bay, without that everything turns messy very quickly but somehow they've managed to keep it all organized and functional. Especially notebooks are a very powerful exploratory programming tool.