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Comment by airstrike | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry, but I find the Calculator app woefully unimpressive.

I can't even type a simple expression with parenthesis. There's no RPN option. There isn't a "financial" setting (only scientific and programmer, for some reason). The list goes on; I'm sure I'm not alone on this one.

It is so, so, so basic it's essentially useless, I end up being forced to open Excel, run Python in the terminal, go on Wolfram Alpha or, worse yet (!!) grab pen and paper to perform basic math.

I know this is unrelated to UWP, but I'd rather they focus less on improving an UI that is inevitably trivial (little boxes with numbers arranged in a grid within a bigger box) and instead added some much needed features.

The fact that I am using a computer must be lost on whoever decided to green light this abomination as the default calculator in any OS ever, let alone one released in the 21st century.

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> I can't even type a simple expression with parenthesis

Use Scientific mode and parentheses work fine

Work "fine" but not quite "great". Made a mistake? Retype the whole expression, as there's no backspace / undo even before hitting =

It sounds like they made the behaviour imitate that of a bad scientific calculator.

I've not used a physical for some years, but even then the Casio ones had a backspace, and had apparently done so for a good few generations.

Yea, the new calculator is kinda bad. But you can search the web for "windows old calculator" and replace the new one with this. It is exactly the calculator as you are used to from Win7.

Feel free to try contributing if you think it that trivial to add "much needed features": https://github.com/microsoft/calculator

Not my cup of tea, sorry. I don't need to provide patches to be allowed to bash software I've paid for ;-)

Contributions doesn't mean just patches. Also, technically you didn't pay for Calculator, you paid for Windows and got a calculator. The fact that Calculator today is open source adds additional insight that it was always probably a "bonus" accessory, as the most interesting stuff happening to it today are from community contributions.

Anyway, for instance, you could see that RPN is on the radar: https://github.com/microsoft/calculator/issues/128

There was a version with all of these features; new version doesn't even have its functional feature parity down...

calc.exe never had RPN support. Some of y'all seem to be remembering a very different calculator than the one built in to Windows. "UWP" Calculator has feature parity with the calc.exe of Vista/7, and has features that calc.exe never had. I wish more of the source control history had been migrated to the git repository, but it's pretty clear from the header comments that one was built out of the codebase of the other (the core of the calculation engine itself goes way back).

"Yeah, well technically you bought a car, you didn't pay for an engine, so the engine being crap isn't something you can complain about."

I don't think this sort of argument works.

The reason it's open source is most likely because it's got nothing of value to competitors but lets them point and say "see, we've changed, look we make things open source now"; aka marketing.

I find that analogy weak because Windows works fine without a calc.exe or Calculator app, but a car doesn't run without an engine. Calculator is more a cup holder. I'm not trying to stop anyone for complaining about their cup holder, that's a great day-to-day productivity tool for a lot of car owners. Just pointing out that fit/finish/polish on a cup holder comes after the things like the engine.

Fwiw, it seems to go far beyond marketing that Calculator is open source, as community contributions have made it into releases and Calculator has seemed to benefit from more (and more diverse) development resources than it had in XP/Vista/7.

The engine in Win 10 isn't quite a masterpiece of consumer productivity either.

You could argue the same for OSX / Linux.

But if the cupholders break, you take the car in and the manufacturer fixes them, no? If they don't fix them you can return the car.

So become an unpaid Microsoft employee to re-add features that used to exist and that do exist in nearly every alternative? Don't they make enough money off of os sales, subscriptions, forced ads and telemetry? They need free labour to fix their broken software too?

Many people love to be FAANG unpaid employees, why should it be any different for Microsoft?

Why not put those efforts towards an actual open source calculator project that could really use the volunteer efforts and doesn't already have an army of paid employees?

https://qalculate.github.io/ https://bitbucket.org/heldercorreia/speedcrunch/

Is that a rhetorical question, or do I really get to argue the benefits of contributing to one of the most installed calculators on the planet? Contributing to small projects is good, but it's not for everyone and you're definitely kidding yourself if an MIT licensed software on Github doesn't qualify as "actual open source".

Yeah I tend to consider moral and ethical implications of my decisions also, I forget not everyone does.

I feel time spent working on projects for a company that hasn't spent the better part of 3 decades trying to dominate and control the entirety of the computer market using strategies that destroy competition and supress innovation, that tracks and monitors its users, that has such a small amount of respect that it will inject ads into a product most customers are forced to purchase should they wish to own a computer, is more valuable in that it makes the world just a slightly better place, rather than a slightly shittier one.

For a moment I thought you were talking about Google.

Because you want to reach >800M users and want everyone to have access to it?

It's an option.

Though I didn't just mean patches from "contribute", it could also mean voice/ideas/discussion: instead of pseudonymously complain on HN, there's Feedback Hub and GitHub Issues. As an option that's available.

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