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Comment by moffkalast | Hacker News Reader

Genuine question, who uses these in practice? In my experience, calculators beyond the basic were always banned in high school and college, cause everyone's so afraid people might store something into them, and afterwards it's just matlab and python. It's not like laptops aren't a thing that everyone has on hand.

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Electronics engineer here. I use my HP Prime G2 daily in the lab for basic things as well as quickly calculating complicated stuff, since you can pretty much program it to do whatever you want.

You might say why not use Python or Matlab?! It‘s true that you don‘t need a small handheld device to do engineering calculations where there is a ton of other much stronger and free options out there. But the thing is, a calculator is a pure dedication to one thing. You turn it on, you do your calculation, get the answer and move on. It gets out of your way. Plus it is a better feeling to type stuff using the dedicated buttons in a calculator than using a keyboard.

These have been standard equipment (that you buy, or the school loans out) in middle-class US high school math since the 90's (and gone basically unchanged since then). The math books even have content tailored to particular models so that you'll have to buy them instead of alternatives from other vendors.

IIRC You don’t use them in the dumb kids class much, you use them a fair amount in the sort of smart class, and you don’t use them much in the actually smart class.

Those are permitted in schools and even exams in the US, for example. That’s also why they’re often so limited, to make the exam cartels happy.

You may have gone to a poor high school and college. I saw plenty of calculator use in high school and college a long time ago.

Poor? In what sense? I graduated a few years ago (in Europe) and I think I could’ve gone through my entire education without owning one. Math, for me, went from nice numbers to ugly numbers that you had to do by hand (because that was the point), then to just letters and squiggles.

At no point was there a need to work with hard numbers or to learn to work with a physical calculator (I haven’t seen one in the wild in years).

Sure calculators were allowed in some cases, the "scientific" kind, not the graphing kind.

But yes I would agree. So much time spent making sure people don't learn to use the tools they'll always have on hand. Programming exams on paper and that kind of inane bullshit.

In my USA high School, they started requiring graphing calculators in the 9th grade math class. You would fail most quizzes/exams without the ability to run the calculations that scientific calculators couldn't do.

I'm struggling to remember using my TI-84 in college though.

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