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I learned to program on my TI-83. Over the past few decades, computers have built more and more walls between typical users and programming, whereas on my calcu
by burke 18y ago
I learned to program on my TI-83. Over the past few decades, computers have built more and more walls between typical users and programming, whereas on my calculator, it was right there... on a whim, I could, say, make a program to calculate the area of a trapezoid. At the time, if you asked me to do the same thing on a desktop computer, you'd be getting a blank stare.
Graphing calculators today are essentially the new programmer's playground that all computers were 20ish years ago.
Why seems to be making great progress toward reversing this change with Shoes and Hackety Hack, but I think the ultimate solution right now would be some sort of programming environment built into iPod Touches. (EDIT: Heh, I stopped reading before the end. I guess that was his idea too.)
- Spyckie 18y agoYeah, I learned on my TI-89. Ironically, made a DnD character stat generator and a function to calculate the first 6 elements of an infinite series... (calc class was quite boring). I abused the GOTO statement, though... hey, it wasn't like you were going to care about elegant code design at age 14 on a TI...
- thalur 18y agoI suspect you hadn't been indoctrinated on GOTO being the one_true_evil at that point. I remember writing programs on my TI83 during maths and physics classes, but BASIC on a BBC was where it all started for me. Lots of GOTOs there. >:)
- utnick 18y agoSame here, I made some pretty complicated games on the TI-85, tetris for example with all of the blocks drawn with "0"s, that was a HUGE mess of gotos and especially when you can only see like 8 lines of code on the screen at a time gotos to far away can get very confusing.