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Comment by kstrauser | Hacker News Reader

RPN felt so weird and alien to me, and then one day I felt my brain pivot, and now it's the only method I can bear. RPN isn't just more efficient for the calculator to process. I mean, it is, but that's not the selling point. It's way more efficient to use. It requires the least number of keystrokes necessary to enter a formula, and never requires parentheses for grouping. You can start at the innermost nested, hairy bits of a formula, then quickly work your way outward. That's the part I love and would hate to be without.

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When I started studying electronics in 1975 I didn't have a calculator, they were very expensive. Then rumours started about an upcoming low-cost Texas Instruments calculator, and IIRC early 1976 I could buy one - the TI-30. As did many of my classmates. The next year or two I used that one, and other similar calculators which entered the marked.

Then one day a guy some two classes above me handed me a HP calculator to try.. and the RPN immediately clicked with me, I could just enter arbitrary long calculations without ever messing up anything or having to keep track of parentheses in my mind. From then on I never looked back and I was on HP calculators ever since (up to and including the Free42 on my phone today).

I have an original HP-16C as well, I used it a lot back in the day, until calculations and transformations of hex, octal and binary was so ingrained in my mind that I didn't really need it much. It's in a drawer, but it's still good. I think I'll make some more use of it now that I'm near retirement age and just doing retrocomputing.

I've heard about the supposed loss of quality of later "HP" calculators, and I may not want to buy this one anyway (as I have an original), but I'm also waiting for someone to review the keys. The keys! That's HP calculators as I learned to know them.

Yeah I understand. For me I just never could get my head around it. My brain doesn't work that way, and I'm the kind of person that always needs to bend their tools to them rather than absorb a new way of working. For example, I deeply hate opinionated software where you have to learn the workflow the developer intended. It can be powerful but I don't work that way. I have my own ideas how something should work and I adapt my tools to it.

RPN but also something like Gnome doesn't match. So I use things like KDE that have huge amounts of configurability. I also deeply hate processes and methodologies at work and I often ignore them leading to endless stress for my more bureaucratic coworkers :)

TL;DR, me not liking RPN doesn't mean I think it's bad. It's just not for me and that is more a 'me' thing than an RPN thing.

@cindyllm: Tbh I don't buy much stuff anymore because most of the things don't fulfill my needs.

I build my own stuff a lot, mostly software for now but I'm working on a special keyboard too.

Nah, I get it. I have a streak of stubbornness, too. Just saying, in this specific case, the odd way to do it has real, genuine advantages and isn't just odd for the sake of being odd. It's not so much an opinion as a philosophy.

If the opportunity arises, I urge you to try making yourself use it for a few days and powering through it. If that a-ha moment comes to you, it changes how you look at arithmatic in general. Or it may never happen, and that's OK, too.

I did use it, back in the day. But the problem is, I use a calculator too few and far between so every time I had to go through this adaptation again.

Also I tend to avoid arithmetic, I hate maths :) What I would like mainly is a binary/hex converter and the ability to do some shifting and XORs etc.

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