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> No, this is not replaced by typing "python" (or "bc", or anything else, really) at your command prompt. Why not? At least I can easily copy the results and

> No, this is not replaced by typing "python" (or "bc", or anything else, really) at your command prompt. Why not? At least I can easily copy the results and the code to a document which avoids transcription errors. Or do you mean that there simply isn't a program that has the functions you use?

tivert 2y ago
>> 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. > Why not? At least I can easily copy the results and the code to a document which avoids transcription errors. Or do you mean that there simply isn't a program that has the functions you use? My guess it's the ergonomics between a specialized tool and a non-specialized one. Technically, python may be able to replace "a good engineering calculator," but so can ASM. No one would even ask "Why non ASM?," because its ergonomics are near-universally understood to be so poor, but the same issues can apply to more popular tools like python, just less obviously.
- 7thaccount 2y ago
  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 allow faster entry, can show large amounts of data on screen, can allow for saving large amounts of data ...etc.
  - exe34 2y ago
    yeah after a decade in my job, I have a ton of utility functions in python that I reach for when given a new request to think through something. I doubt a smaller screen where I have to type in stuff and then copy out results would make it any easier.
    - jwr 2y ago
      This thread is making my point for me rather well.
      - exe34 2y ago
        yes a lot of people love them, but nobody's actually coming up with anything I can't do in python...
        jwr 2y ago
        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.
        exe34 2y ago
        usually with programming languages, we mention certain things - like how python is easier to read, it's almost like English. it comes with dozens of well designed built-in libraries to do a lot of useful things, and thousands of external libraries to do the rest - even gluing together c/Fortran code for the speedup. it's well supported on many platforms so you can design on one comfortable os environment and deploy in a scalable one. 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.
  - hggigg 2y ago
    Some of us (mathematics side) still actually work on paper with calculators. Most of the job is thinking which tooling doesn’t necessarily improve.
    - zokier 2y ago
      > Most of the job is thinking which tooling doesn’t necessarily improve yet you use paper and calculator.
      - hggigg 2y ago
        near the end of the thinking yes.
      - dylan604 2y ago
        That's like a carpenter saying it only took 10 seconds to make that cut while ignoring the 3 hours it took to create the jig so the cut would take 10 seconds. 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
  - SirHumphrey 2y ago
    I don’t use the physical HP50G i have that often, but i love it emulated on the phone. It’s for semi complicated quick calculations where scientific calculator interface really shines compared to anything else available.
    - jwr 2y ago
      What emulator do you use? I'd really like to run HP50G on iOS, but the only emulator I know was abandoned years ago (I got the source just in case, but it's a lot of work to fix the issues and build it).
      - SirHumphrey 2y ago
        Yeah, turns out i mistyped a bit. The emulated one is not 50G but HP49G+ (i use iHP48 app to do it)
- 0x1ceb00da 2y ago
  We need a concrete example.
  - wiredfool 2y ago
    0.85f’c
    - exe34 2y ago
      What does it mean?
      - wiredfool 2y ago
        It's the concrete design compressive stress - a simple example of a concrete equation.
hggigg 2y ago
You just write the stuff down or translate it to LaTeX. Incidentally the 50G (and Prime) has a decent CAS built in which seems to get stuck less than some other commercial ones.
c3d 2y ago
> Why not? Keystroke count and progressive computations. Let me illustrate using an example from a YouTube video called "The hardest Exam Question : Only 6% of students solved it correctly" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfgEPsm9Jzw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfgEPsm9Jzw), which is about a simplified formulation for (sqrt(2)-1)^10. The first remark is that a CAS-capable calculator like DB48x can help with the symbolic part of the computation shown in the video. However, to be fair, DB48x still lacks some of the relevant HP48 interactive equation manipulation features to be able to demonstrate that. So let's focus for now on the numerical part. The author shows that (sqrt(2)-1)^10 is the same as 3363-2378*sqrt(2). Let's evaluate that using bc. Attempt 1: bc, then (sqrt(2)-1)^10-(3363-2378*sqrt(2)) Result: -985. Er... What? OK. What is the option for precision again? man bc. Search for precision. Mentions the @ operator. Does not seem to do it. 5 minutes of search later, find that precision is called scale, that I need the -S option. I could also presumably use the -l option, which experimentally seems to set the scale to 20. Starting to remember why I am not a big fan of bc ;-) Trying again. bc -l (sqrt(2)-1)^10-(3363-2378*sqrt(2)) now gives me: -.00000000000000000402. Counting "bc -l" and ENTER keys, that's I believe 42 keystrokes. Trying again with db48x: I need 23 keys using the most naive RPN data entry. The result is -1.57861 99E⁻²⁰ with the default 24-digit precision. I can also enter the same algebraic expression as in bc directly in the simulator using copy-paste. I get a nice graphical rendering of the expression, which I can check, and then just one key (EVAL/=) to get the numerical value. As another example, let's try to check if the Ramanujan constant in an integer: bc -l e(sqrt(163)*pi(20)) 262537412640768743.98947654935272888605 That does not look like an integer to me. And it's way more than the 20 digits I would expect from scale. What is weird is that it gives me a false sense of accuracy, all the digits after "43.9" are bogus, as shown by switching the scaling to 100: bc -l -S100 e(sqrt(163)*pi(100)) 262537412640768743.9999999999992500725971981856888793538563373369908\ 627075374103782106479101186073126534265238592035363 21 keystrokes, and a result that is a bit hard to interpret with the default precision (scaling). In other words, it's pretty easy to get bogus numerical results and not know it. With DB48x, after selecting a precision of 100, 11 keystrokes including menu selection to get the pi constant, and I get: 262 537 412 640 768 743.99999 99999 99250 07259 71981 85688 87935 38563 37336 99086 27075 37410 37821 06479 10118 60730 76 > At least I can easily copy the results and the code to a document which avoids transcription errors. This is also true with the DB48x simulator, which supports copy and paste both ways. This is how I copied the values above, or entered the exact same algebraic expression as in bc into the simulator.

tivert 2y ago

>> 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. > Why not? At least I can easily copy the results and the code to a document which avoids transcription errors. Or do you mean that there simply isn't a program that has the functions you use? My guess it's the ergonomics between a specialized tool and a non-specialized one. Technically, python may be able to replace "a good engineering calculator," but so can ASM. No one would even ask "Why non ASM?," because its ergonomics are near-universally understood to be so poor, but the same issues can apply to more popular tools like python, just less obviously.

7thaccount 2y ago
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 allow faster entry, can show large amounts of data on screen, can allow for saving large amounts of data ...etc.
- exe34 2y ago
  yeah after a decade in my job, I have a ton of utility functions in python that I reach for when given a new request to think through something. I doubt a smaller screen where I have to type in stuff and then copy out results would make it any easier.
  - jwr 2y ago
    This thread is making my point for me rather well.
    - exe34 2y ago
      yes a lot of people love them, but nobody's actually coming up with anything I can't do in python...
      - jwr 2y ago
        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.
        exe34 2y ago
        usually with programming languages, we mention certain things - like how python is easier to read, it's almost like English. it comes with dozens of well designed built-in libraries to do a lot of useful things, and thousands of external libraries to do the rest - even gluing together c/Fortran code for the speedup. it's well supported on many platforms so you can design on one comfortable os environment and deploy in a scalable one. 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.
- hggigg 2y ago
  Some of us (mathematics side) still actually work on paper with calculators. Most of the job is thinking which tooling doesn’t necessarily improve.
  - zokier 2y ago
    > Most of the job is thinking which tooling doesn’t necessarily improve yet you use paper and calculator.
    - hggigg 2y ago
      near the end of the thinking yes.
    - dylan604 2y ago
      That's like a carpenter saying it only took 10 seconds to make that cut while ignoring the 3 hours it took to create the jig so the cut would take 10 seconds. 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
- SirHumphrey 2y ago
  I don’t use the physical HP50G i have that often, but i love it emulated on the phone. It’s for semi complicated quick calculations where scientific calculator interface really shines compared to anything else available.
  - jwr 2y ago
    What emulator do you use? I'd really like to run HP50G on iOS, but the only emulator I know was abandoned years ago (I got the source just in case, but it's a lot of work to fix the issues and build it).
    - SirHumphrey 2y ago
      Yeah, turns out i mistyped a bit. The emulated one is not 50G but HP49G+ (i use iHP48 app to do it)
0x1ceb00da 2y ago
We need a concrete example.
- wiredfool 2y ago
  0.85f’c
  - exe34 2y ago
    What does it mean?
    - wiredfool 2y ago
      It's the concrete design compressive stress - a simple example of a concrete equation.

hggigg 2y ago

You just write the stuff down or translate it to LaTeX. Incidentally the 50G (and Prime) has a decent CAS built in which seems to get stuck less than some other commercial ones.

c3d 2y ago

> Why not? Keystroke count and progressive computations. Let me illustrate using an example from a YouTube video called "The hardest Exam Question : Only 6% of students solved it correctly" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfgEPsm9Jzw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfgEPsm9Jzw), which is about a simplified formulation for (sqrt(2)-1)^10. The first remark is that a CAS-capable calculator like DB48x can help with the symbolic part of the computation shown in the video. However, to be fair, DB48x still lacks some of the relevant HP48 interactive equation manipulation features to be able to demonstrate that. So let's focus for now on the numerical part. The author shows that (sqrt(2)-1)^10 is the same as 3363-2378*sqrt(2). Let's evaluate that using bc. Attempt 1: bc, then (sqrt(2)-1)^10-(3363-2378*sqrt(2)) Result: -985. Er... What? OK. What is the option for precision again? man bc. Search for precision. Mentions the @ operator. Does not seem to do it. 5 minutes of search later, find that precision is called scale, that I need the -S option. I could also presumably use the -l option, which experimentally seems to set the scale to 20. Starting to remember why I am not a big fan of bc ;-) Trying again. bc -l (sqrt(2)-1)^10-(3363-2378*sqrt(2)) now gives me: -.00000000000000000402. Counting "bc -l" and ENTER keys, that's I believe 42 keystrokes. Trying again with db48x: I need 23 keys using the most naive RPN data entry. The result is -1.57861 99E⁻²⁰ with the default 24-digit precision. I can also enter the same algebraic expression as in bc directly in the simulator using copy-paste. I get a nice graphical rendering of the expression, which I can check, and then just one key (EVAL/=) to get the numerical value. As another example, let's try to check if the Ramanujan constant in an integer: bc -l e(sqrt(163)*pi(20)) 262537412640768743.98947654935272888605 That does not look like an integer to me. And it's way more than the 20 digits I would expect from scale. What is weird is that it gives me a false sense of accuracy, all the digits after "43.9" are bogus, as shown by switching the scaling to 100: bc -l -S100 e(sqrt(163)*pi(100)) 262537412640768743.9999999999992500725971981856888793538563373369908\ 627075374103782106479101186073126534265238592035363 21 keystrokes, and a result that is a bit hard to interpret with the default precision (scaling). In other words, it's pretty easy to get bogus numerical results and not know it. With DB48x, after selecting a precision of 100, 11 keystrokes including menu selection to get the pi constant, and I get: 262 537 412 640 768 743.99999 99999 99250 07259 71981 85688 87935 38563 37336 99086 27075 37410 37821 06479 10118 60730 76 > At least I can easily copy the results and the code to a document which avoids transcription errors. This is also true with the DB48x simulator, which supports copy and paste both ways. This is how I copied the values above, or entered the exact same algebraic expression as in bc into the simulator.