Re: Why do so many people love Teas Instruments?

On Tue, 21 Aug 2007 09:53:46 -0500, Jacek Marchel wrote:

Making that even more difficult and confusing students with RPN notation / logic
would make [teachers'] jobs even more difficult.

RPN by its nature is limited to the few talented people,
who have no problems with math and tend to appreciate additional power
that comes from the special notation. This makes HP a niche product
and TI a mainstream product.

"Somebody has to do it" (support the shrinking pool of future engineers ;)

But it's only a war of images, marketing and fashion,
because mechanical calculators all originated as "RPN"
(first you set the number, then you turned the crank,
one way for "+" or the other way for "-", or something similar),
which is in fact the easiest and most natural thing to implement,
and all early electronic calculators at first duplicated that
(the only "infix" operators, at first, were "*" and "/",
with those calculations terminating either in "=+" or "=-",
thus returning to a "postfix" addition or subtraction at the end).

God only knows how all human businesses ever survived
using those machines, in the hands of the mainstream
everyday folk who used them, but I guess they did.

A kid with an algebraic four-banger in hand might never conceive
how generations of ordinary Chinese learned to do arithmetic
in bi-quinary on their abaci, but I guess they also did,
possibly often faster than many kids can work their four-bangers today;
I wonder whether groups who used different varieties of those tools also
spent their time deriding each other, just as much as do today's users.

If a little RPN were the first math introduced on "Sesame Street,"
I bet that a generation would grow up thinking that they were born using it,
and would end up preferring it; it has nothing to do with talent,
but simply with custom, and the culture into which one is thrust.

The fact that various keystroke sequences on algebraic calculators
produce widely inconsistent effects on various models
(whereas this is much less true of more unambiguous RPN)
of course also has no bearing on the issue
of confusion vs. consistency.

For years, some calculators have accommodated both systems,
and will work either way, as preferred, but don't let that
stand in the way of throwing up all the flak one can think of,
valid or not, for dissent is an important right, especially
for people from certain once violently oppressed countries
where sometimes it seems that an exercise in continuing dissent
must be found every day, just to stay in practice.

Early reviews by JAM:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.hp48/msg/77a3ed9be5291b7a
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.hp48/msg/dbcd33bf73452c85
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.hp48/msg/d4d1c1e383f008d1

"One of the great advantages of HP is that its interface
allows much easier and deeper integration of software,
where TI seems rather as a group of unrelated pieces of software
that have hard time to talk to each other." [in last link above]

"All calcs were once RPN" ["P" for "Polish," like JAM and A.L. :]
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.hp48/msg/f915564652d52afd

...those are probably the same people who claim that command
line interface is powerful and don't understand why general public
prefers to pay $200 for Windows instead of using command line driven
Linux for free :-)

Because manufacturers were forced to buy it for every PC they made?
Because they like the free ad-ware that comes with it?

Windows supports scripting (and Cygwin); Linux supports GUIs;
multi-platform software appears almost identical on each,
I just installed Windows XP on a Mac Mini (using "Boot Camp");
you can have all advantages of all worlds within each product,
just as in calculators, but of course at the cost of some of the fun
of having the old enemy to keep battling.

[Visual] studio itself is OK. I have more problems with their .NET
approach. I dislike the need to have runtime installed, lack of native
code and convoluted access to OS API (unless you want to go through
the sadistic convolutions of C++ .NET). The garbage collection of .NET
is a beautiful thing, but it would be nice if you could at the end to
be able to compile the whole C# project into the native code that can
be run on any Windows machine without the need of runtime being
installed there first...

Like the entire world (or universe),
no one single spot is paradise for everyone,
but there are good beaches for surfing and sunning here,
good snow for skiing there,
a packed city full of shopping, dining and arts here,
a pristine woods for quiet repose there,
an enormous range of niches -- "variety is the spice of life."

JAM

Jelly And Marmalade too -- why not? ;-)

(o)
.