Calculators just have a bad user interface in general. It’s pretty amazing that the UI was established in 1970 and was never changed after that.
ah yes, wait until you find out about the qwerty keyboard. Or better yet, the fucking ABCDE layout for some godforsaken reason.
In defence of QWERTY, it did a decent job for what it was designed for (reducing the risk of mechanical typewriters jamming by not having two hammers next to each other be pressed at the same time), but really oughtn’t have lasted past the point where the risk of jamming was not longer there.
I think people exaggerate how bad QWERTY is. Studies have not consistently found an advantage for one keyboard layout over another, and some studies even show that typists can reach equivalent speeds even with randomised layouts. This suggests that experience and practice with a particular layout is far more important to typing speed than the particular placement of letters. Which is a good argument for keeping qwerty around.
(reducing the risk of mechanical typewriters jamming by not having two hammers next to each other be pressed at the same time),
This story is quite common but there is little evidence that it’s actually true. The designer of qwerty actually made a late adjustment to move R next to E (swapping it with period), even though ER is the second most common letter combination in English.
Well, they’ve sold the same product for about the same price since 1970, so it makes sense. I have no idea how schools can require a specific device from a specific manufacturer. It’s just straight up market control by a public entity.
Its to make sure that they don’t get a billion questions about what button to push next and not being able to complete homework because of button confusion. Does it still need to exist today? Probably no but good luck getting rid of a standard adopted by all manufacturers of textbooks.
Curious to know why ? Basic functionality seems very obvious and friendly to me.
If there is any nuance beyond a 4-function calculator with a single clear button, any nuance or deviation from any kind of standard will not be clearly explained.
There’s never a backspace key, only two “clear” buttons that have nuance between them and little to no description as to which does what.
For one thing, just displaying the latest number isn’t useful if you’re doing anything complicated. For another, many calculations involve using the same number over again multiple times. Some calculators have a memory entry, but many don’t. There’s a “C/CE” but there isn’t a backspace, so if you get one digit wrong, you have to start that entry over (and hope you chose the right option among C/CE/AC/CA/etc. If you accidentally hit the wrong operation key (multiply, divide, plus, minus) AFAIK there’s no way to clear the operation. A lot of common math operations involves parenthesized expressions, but if you’re using a basic calculator you have to instead enter things in an unnatural order. It’s pretty common to end up in a situation where the calculator is displaying B and you want to do A/B but you can only easily do B/A. Fancy calculators have a 1/X button to fix this, but if not you’re out of luck. Same with having B and wanting to do A-B but only being able to do B-A. You can fix that by multiplying by -1, but again, it’s a UI issue that you can’t just say “hold onto that number for a second because I want to enter another number and then use it”.
But it has been changed a lot?
The most basic immediate execution four operation calculator might still look the same, but that’s because it’s a very simple thing and you can’t really get much wrong. For scientific calculators the UI has changed lots. As have the requirements. It used to be a specialist tool used to do thousands of calculations daily. An expensive thing that had to earn its keep. RPN and stuff like that made sense for people who could easily get back weeks of training in just a few years of being slightly more efficient while working. Now we have the natural order delayed execution thing, because the calculators are mostly for students. Who need the UI to be as easy to grasp as possible, because they won’t ever have to do enough calculations to benefit from a faster but harder UI. That doesn’t mean any of those approaches to UI is better or worse. Some things require instructions and making everything idiot-proof shouldn’t ever be the ultimate goal (check out modern computing for why!).
(check out modern computing for why!)
Because when you need to do a process a thousand times, you program it in an actual computer. Then you just have a specific interface for just your process that makes everything simple.
And the developer really only needs to understand the process for a couple months. Once it’s confirmed working correctly, you’re generally done with that piece of code.
