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Comment by castratikron | Hacker News Reader

I'm hoping the next generation will move off of TI-8x calculators and into things like Octave for grade school use.

There was a point in my education where I had mastered my trusty TI-83; I knew the purpose of every single function and how to use them. But then, I started running into problems in the real world that required more than 32 KB of memory to solve. When I moved to a laptop I had to relearn all of that knowledge again. Haven't touched my TI-83 since.

It would be nice if the tools we learned how to use in school could also be useful in solving our problems after we graduate!

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I wish they'd rather use python or Julia. GNU Octave is great. But as a clone of Matlab it's constraint by compatibility and doomed to always be second* and at worst an enabler for Matlab. I'd rather break the dominance that Matlab has in many fields and replace it with free software.

* There are a few aspects where it is better. For example I believe the variable editor introduced one or two releases ago is nicer as it allows inline evaluation.

> rather use python or Julia .. break the dominance that Matlab has in many fields and replace it with free software

I still think Octave has a niche to fill for students and HPC where software engineering (package management, compilation etc) is of insufficient concern.

At least in the US, high school education still and probably will use TI calculators for the foreseeable future. They are a long existing standard and very practical for that environment. However, most AP classes do allow the use of the TI-Nspire which is a much more capable platform than the TI-8x series. And even in that series, the TI-84 and variants are much more popular now.

At the college level, at least for engineering programs, at my school there was a pretty big emphasis on doing a lot by hand besides trivial stuff like addition and multiplication. The extent that we would utilize calculators seemed very minimal. Most of the degree programs including teaching students one or more of Mathematica, matlab, octave, and R. But I would say it sounds like the depth you had for the TI-83 doesn't really exist in the modern education, rather it is a more broad use of multiple platforms.

Not sure what kind of lobbying & campaign contributions have built the TI stronghold on the education market, but highschool kids today seem to use pretty much the same TI-85 that I had in the 1990s, except with a more colorful shell.

Was in high school in the 2010s and I had to buy a TI-84. They have a version with more storage and a color display but it’s still that same calculator all these years later.

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