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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
by 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 agoI'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 agoyeah 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 agoThis thread is making my point for me rather well.
- exe34 2y agoyes a lot of people love them, but nobody's actually coming up with anything I can't do in python...
- jwr 2y agoYou 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 agousually 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.
- dylan604 2y agoWhen all you have is a hammer arguments are so much fun
- exe34 2y agoevery now and again, I download the user manual for a graphing calculator and every time I've been underwhelmed by what they have to offer. What impresses me in this discussion is how coy everybody has been about the actual benefits of these devices.
- hggigg 2y agoSome 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 agonear the end of the thinking yes.
- dylan604 2y agoThat'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 agoI 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 agoWhat 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 agoYeah, turns out i mistyped a bit. The emulated one is not 50G but HP49G+ (i use iHP48 app to do it)
- 0x1ceb00da 2y agoWe need a concrete example.