
Go Ahead, Mess With Texas Instruments - awwstn
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/08/go-ahead-mess-with-texas-instruments/278899/
======
robterrell
I'm accustomed to popular blog blowhards repeating the "you can't write code
on an iPad" mantra, but I expect better here. We all know you can write code
on an iPad, right? Off the top of my head, I can think of free/cheap apps in
the app store for JavaScript, Python, Scheme, Perl.

Or Lua... my kids have my hand-me-down iPads. Each has Codea installed. Codea
is a gorgeous Lua development environment with a great on-device editor and
great libraries for sprites, sound, touch, accelerometer, and physics.

For some things, the Codea editor is better than what I use at work. For
instance, if a function takes a color value as an argument, when the cursor is
in that character position, a color picker pops up. Likewise, when using the
sprite command, instead of typing in a name you can open a popover that
displays a list of sprites on the device. It pulls assets from your photo
library or links to your dropbox, so you can easily get assets in and out of
the device.

My daughter decided to make a program to implement the sorting hat from Harry
Potter. She googled for images of the sorting hat and other harry potter
things, saved them to the device, and spent an hour obsessively re-writing her
draw function so that things appeared where she wanted them to. She was
stumped by randomness, so I helped her look in the built-in reference for
math.random() and, with another assist on how to write an if-else block, she
figured out how to use it. Keyboard input was rougher (Codea lacks the common
UI widgets) but she got something working to her satisfaction.

So, after a few hours of playing around, she had a fun little sorting hat toy.
She understands variables, incrementing variables every frame to create
animation, what the word "random" really means (as opposed to her previous
definition for the word, from some Disney channel show), and how to do some
basic if-else flow control. Now when people ask her about her iPad, she says
she knows Lua and shows them her sorting hat.

Codea can export directly to an Xcode project, so next weekend we're going to
turn her sorting hat game into an app and install it on her iPad. I think
that's when she'll be fully converted into a mobile app developing geek.

So, the article... there's a fun walk down memory lane (I, too, goofed off in
school writing games for a programmable calculator) but it's unfortunate that
he framed it with a TI-verus-iPad. Plus, his conclusion is just plain wrong.

~~~
zimbatm
That's where the story ends though. I never owned a TI-83 but I remember
class-mates linking their TI and sharing programs. Here you have to export to
Xcode, pay Apple $99 and fill a bunch of forms, wait for app-store approval.

~~~
robterrell
Really? She can email her friends the project file or the code. Seems better
than linking through some rare cable. And if she really rocks it and makes
something people will pay for, she has a venue for it.

~~~
angersock
Sharing programs on an 83 was simplicity itself, and always worked, and cables
were usually pretty easy to find.

~~~
hkmurakami
I remember going to summer camp and getting my classmate's shooter game
program ;)

~~~
angersock
The day I got the MirageOS app for my calculator was magical.

------
jere
I too wrote my first code on a TI-81. Though I had been making games for a
while with various tools (e.g. TGF), it was nice to finally close the loop and
write in a programming language, even if it was only BASIC. That pushed me to
take a programming course in high school the following year. I was writing
pong and asteroid clones and ray casting engines in class.

The author's points about the iPad seem pretty accurate. I can't even imagine
how I would go from having an iPad as a high school student to stumbling into
programming.

I haven't developed in iOS, but I did play around with Android and the thing
that really frustrated me was that the sample games were several files and
~1,000 LOC. We're talking _really_ simple games and the amount of boilerplate
crap was mind boggling. To even get to that point, of course, you have to
screw around with an IDE, plugins, an emulator, etc.

It's a far cry from _PRINT "HELLO WORLD"_

~~~
zokier
> The author's points about the iPad seem pretty accurate. I can't even
> imagine how I would go from having an iPad as a high school student to
> stumbling into programming.

Funny, I thought the exact opposite; I agreed on the general point, but found
the arguments against iPad bit weak. First of all they were factually
incorrect. As others have demonstrated there are plenty of apps that allow
programming the iPad in a way that is at least comparable to TIBASIC. You
don't need developer accounts or review processes to use those apps.

More importantly the author missed the part that iPad is essentially just a
platform, a tabula rasa if I may say so. As it does not provide _any_
educational features on its own (afaik) some apps need to be provided by the
school. And those apps provide the discoverability aspect that is missing from
a vanilla iPad. It is reasonable to think that school would provide/require an
app (or a collection of apps) that would be an equal or surpass the features
of a graphing calc, including the programming features.

Of course I'm not really sure what educational apps are currently available,
if they are adequate. But if not, then _that_ would actually be something that
HNers could do something about.

~~~
cpleppert
The difference with TI's calculator was there was a social motivation/aspect
to programming them. Everyone had them and it was very easy to get
started.There are programming environments for the iPad but it is a lot harder
to share programs as not everyone has one and even if they do they need
another level of indirection to get the program. The calculator is also much
more prevalent/easy to use in the classroom.

My first program was a quadratic equation solver that everyone at my school
used. I remember a couple people tried to imitate and improve on my program
but I crushed them with new features and a better interface. I don't think I
could do that with the iPad.

The technology is also a lot more complex and daunting with the iPad. You have
the paradox of choice in choosing how you want to program it. You can't easily
share programs with others and TIBasic, just due to its simplicity and the
lack of design knowledge and effort for the user interface is a lot easier for
a kid to pick up and start using.

One thing that isn't mentioned in the article is that if you wanted direct
control over the screen you had to program in assembly; I don't even think
they had programming language support for it at the time. It made it a lot
harder to use than the regular TiBasic.

~~~
mtdewcmu
You also needed a special cable to upload software written in assembly onto
the calculator. I started teaching myself Z80 assembly in order to program the
TI-85, but I never got the cable, so I never got to try it.

------
danso
Anyone ever play "Dope Hunter"? Actually I forgot what it was called exactly,
but it was like a Legend of the Red Dragon type game, except you were a drug
dealer, and it worked on TI-81s.

I agree with the OP that iPads currently restrict most users to being
consumers, rather than programmers...but I'll admit, I didn't know many people
who finagled around with creating or modifying TI programs...we mostly just
distributed programs, downloaded from the Internet (or BBSes) among ourselves.
However, the interface of a calculator was (understandably) pretty painful, so
I think some of the more industrious of us did hack our own routines for
common calculations. Even that kind of rudimentary programming/problem-solving
isn't possible from the iPad or its more popular educational apps.

~~~
chch
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drugwars](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drugwars)

I always knew it as Dope Wars, but I believe this is the game you were
referencing.

~~~
libraryatnight
I loved this game in high school. We played the Windows version in my
networking class. I remember shouts of "Ahh yea, cocaine is super cheap in
_____!" going across the room as we tried to outmatch each other's cash pool.

------
ChuckMcM
I still have my TI-92+, it was the pinnacle of graphing calculators, basically
running Mathematica on the equivalent of a Sun-1 workstation in your hand. And
of course TI-Basic.

While the article suffers a bit from nostalgia, the central message that young
people develop learning skills from 'constructable' activities (be it
programming a calculator or building things in shop class) is something we
have put at risk. In many ways "art" is the most important class you can take
in High School since it can challenge your thinking in ways that no amount of
rote memorization can.

The bottom line for me was that its great that some folks can see the benefit,
but not a whole lot of ideas about keeping that spirit alive in the school
system.

------
josecastillo
In high school my friends and I decided that once we understood the concept
of, say, the Pythagorean Theorem, making us solve it over and over again was
busywork. So we made programs to solve things, and then an application called
AMATH to collect all those programs.

At one point the teachers caught wind of this app everyone was using, and made
everyone start showing their work. So I reprogrammed my modules to show their
work, line by line. I soon forgot about all of this and went into an unrelated
area of study at university; I think I only ever took one college-level comp
sci class. Today I make my living in mobile apps.

------
fnordfnordfnord
Let me tell you why I hate TI's shitty calculators.

Mainly because they are marketed so aggressively to educators.

Back in 1990, I was given a TI scientific calculator, and some exercises to
practice. I was to enter the UIL contest titled "Calculator Math" or something
like that. It was a speed contest. My school (small rural public school),
having the smartest and best-prepared students won at the first level of
competition beating everyone. We punched our buttons furiously, we were
punching buttons as fast as is possible without having registration errors. We
figured nobody could beat us, since we made few errors. At the next level we
competed, something went wrong. The test went as usual, we finished most of
the exam in the allotted time, but did not score well enough to advance. The
thing is, after about two-thirds of the allotted time had passed, students
from other schools started getting up and leaving. During the exam, I smugly
assumed they were giving up because I _knew_ that nobody was a significantly
faster button-pusher than me, not by that large an amount. I was puzzled.
Later I learned what an RPN calculator was, and began to understand what
happened. I am a college instructor today, and I have yet to meet a student
who knows what an RPN calculator is. Nearly every teacher's supply catalog
that gets crammed into my mail sells TI exclusively.

~~~
jff
Partway through college I bought an old HP-48 and suddenly had this
realization. The TI system encourages you to enter exactly what you see on the
page, plus a whole bunch of parentheses because calculators are dumb and
everyone's paranoid about order of operations. With RPN, you just do the math.

~~~
zokier
> plus a whole bunch of parentheses because calculators are dumb and
> everyone's paranoid about order of operations

Oh yeah.. and no paren matching either and iirc multiline editing was
inconvenient enough that i never used it.

------
jacobolus
Graphing calculators are entirely unnecessary for learning high school/college
mathematics/physics/etc. (though they might be useful for engineering students
working on-site where access to a full computer is impractical – I don't have
such experience with that, so can’t comment).

There is no good pedagogical reason for assigning problems to students which
use numbers that can’t be worked out easily on paper or with a regular
scientific calculator. Forcing students to expend effort on keeping track of
many-digit numbers is in general an unnecessary mental load which distracts
from the concepts being taught. Including "how to use your calculator"
sections as part of mathematics instruction, and assigning "calculator
problems" which include e.g. unreasonably complex symbolic integration
problems or unreasonably precise numbers, for the sake of giving students
practice with a graphing calculator interface is a waste of teacher and
student effort.

Additionally, Because Texas Instruments has so effectively lobbied textbook
authors and test writers and school administrations to get their calculators
on the list of approved/official devices, many students are prompted to spend
an unreasonable amount of money on calculators which they do not need. It’s
something like a tax on those students.

TI graphing calculators have awful, obtuse interfaces. Their programming and
debugging tools are rudimentary and outdated. Their graphics capabilities are
limited, and graphics made with them can’t be used for any other purpose or
easily shared. Students would be much better served by lessons/mentoring on
the use of regular general-purpose computers and programming languages,
whether for mathematics or whatever else. If they need symbolic integration or
graphing capabilities for solving some concrete engineering problem, or for
exploring, they would be much better served by a tool such as Mathematica or
Maple [or heck, Python] than by a TI calculator. Full computers are much
better for inputting and interacting with data and mathematical structures.

It's been 9 years since I was in high school. But on principle, I never bought
a graphing calculator, and I never found it to be any disadvantage in any
course I encountered in high school or college [except, briefly, on the AP
Calculus test, where I had to familiarize myself with the TI83's awful UI on a
borrowed calculator during the test; it didn’t end up hurting my score].
However, I found programming in Maple, and later Python, to be invaluable in
solving all sorts of problems.

~~~
bpodgursky
Comments like this are why hacker news is so frustrating now. It's a rant
about TI calculators which doesn't address any of the points made in the
article itself, yet is sitting at the top of the comments.

If you want to talk about TI calculators in general, write a blog post and
post it here or something, but I don't see why this mostly-unrelated comment
needs to dominate any discussion about the actual points being discussed in
the article.

~~~
jacobolus
Sorry. Let me try to make it relevant:

(1) I think it’s great to give kids general-purpose tools for unstructured
hacking. There’s enormous pedagogical value for every person in learning to
think procedurally, break things down into parts, debug algorithms, and
explore mathematical systems. Every teacher should read _Mindstorms_.

(2) General purpose computers are nowadays really great for this, if the
proper programming environments get set up on them. They have awesome screens
for displaying neat graphics. They have reasonable keyboards for quickly
typing in code and numbers and symbols. They have amazing CPUs and GPUs which
can crunch numbers like nobody’s business.

(3) I think we should start kids programming at age 5-8 with a tool like
Scratch or Logo or I dunno what, but something designed and tested on
children, with good sets of materials and curricula set up to teach them to do
exploratory programming.

(4) I think at some point students should be given tools which give them low-
level access to hardware, like I dunno an Arduino or something. These things
are getting to be $20-30 now, and it’s possible to use them for all sorts of
nifty stuff and learn how to operate on constrained systems and twiddle bits
in memory and whatever supposed advantage a TI calculator would offer, if
that’s the goal.

(5) Many people don’t use tablet computers (or other computers) in math
courses in school in a very pedagogically sound way, and a lot of software
used in schools is terrible. (Giving access to open-ended exploratory systems
is much better than giving access to one-purpose constrained tools.) This is
too bad, because big color multitouch displays are really nice input/output
devices for many purposes.

(6) It’s all well and good that the original author and many other people had
a nice experience programming a TI calculator as a way to stave off boredom in
math class, or whatever. But TI graphing calculators were overpriced and
outdated and frankly pretty crappy relative to other devices people used 10
years ago, as long as we get the right software on those devices. By now it’s
just ridiculous. Making people type BASIC into a calculator using tiny buttons
and a little monochrome screen is not the right way to introduce mathematics,
or programming, or anything else.

~~~
angersock
The 83 calculator was rugged, had great battery life, was programmable even in
the simplest of ways, and basically kicked ass at its niche--remaining useful
even through senior year of mechanical engineering at my college.

I'm sorry it's not sexy and shiny, but the thing represents an excellent
optimization for price, durability, speed, and utility. The fact is that the
83 is basically the AK47 of the calculator world--ugly, old, outdated, and
_utterly fantastic at what it sets out to do_.

You seem to overlook the fact that while we've got these great general-purpose
tools for doing computation, the 83 is first and foremost a graphing
calculator. It handles basic statistics quite well, handles graphing and
intercepts okay, and _as a bonus_ has a very simple and robust programming
interface.

Raspberry Pis and Arduinos and OLPCs are cool and all, but in terms of just
giving kids the basic tools they need to solve adult problems _soonest_ , they
fail.

EDIT:

I'm not saying I think they still need to be $100 a pop--a design refresh to
get them down to more modest prices wouldn't hurt, but still.

------
tzs
> It wasn't until 1990, when Texas Instruments released the TI-81 graphing
> calculator, that the medium became a feasible platform for game design

Nonsense. People were writing calculator games long before graphing
calculators were introduced. There were lunar lander games for HP and TI
calculators in the late '70s and early '80s, for example. HP had a "Game Pac"
for the HP-67 that included blackjack, craps, a slot machine game, a sub hunt
game, an artillery firing game, a space war game, a game based on
"Mastermind", Nim, and more.

The HP-41C, introduced in 1979, and (amusingly) discontinued in 1990 (the year
the author says game design became feasible on calculators) had an
alphanumeric display so it could do word-based games, and Hangman and an an
Adventure-like game were available.

~~~
sigil
The article also makes it sound like TI released the first graphing calculator
in 1990. In fact, HP did that a full 3 years earlier.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP-28C](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP-28C)

I much preferred programming the HP-28 (and later the HP-48G) to the TI-8x
series. An RPN language is a natural extension of the calculator interface,
while a BASIC interpreter always felt like a weird bolt-on.

------
rickdale
Great article. I used to ask girls for phone numbers and such by borrowing
their calculators and writing a small program. For my biggest crush I wrote
her a program that spit out nice quotes whenever she ran it, what a blast.

My response to the article though is that kids today have iPads and other
tablets and they will delve into those they way we embraced the TI-83.

~~~
mscottmcbee
The article talks about the difficulty in that. With the TI-8x series you
could work directly on the device. With today's tablets you need a computer
and developer licenses.

~~~
bluedino
Then again we are talking about a device called a 'programmable calculator',
you can't really compare it to an iPad.

It's funny how the barrier of entry to programming is higher now in some
cases, but lower in others.

In the old days computers booted to BASIC. C compilers etc cost hundreds of
dollars. Today's devices don't boot into BASIC but you can get a ton of
programming environments and tools for nothing other than the cost of a
download or copying a disk. Even to work with Apple devices you're only
looking at $99/year (not counting $1,000 for the necessary Mac)

Maybe Apple should make some sort of student license where you can work with
1-5 devices but you can't publish on the store?

~~~
rjsw
The first device that I wrote a program for was a TI-57, this was a couple of
years before I learned BASIC, the idea that you can make something follow your
instructions is important.

------
shurcooL
I miss this.

I used to have a Palm device. It had a black and white 320x320 screen, slow
CPU, low memory, and no Wi-Fi. But I could run PocketC on it and work on a
hobby game project, either on a computer or the device itself.

A few years later I got an iPhone 3GS. It had a much faster CPU, better
screen, wifi and 3G Internet with a browser that could display desktop
websites. It was leaps and bounds more powerful and capable than the Palm
device, except I couldn't actually develop any pet game project on the device
itself (in a C-like language; I suppose JS dev is possible).

------
mightybyte
I agree with the author that the iPad could definitely be a more approachable
platform. However, I think that the comparison to a TI-83 is also a little bit
naive. The TI has a 64 x 96 pixel greyscale display. The iPad's resolution
2048 x 1536 in full color with a quad-core dedicated graphics processor. In
order to work with that, we have huge APIs implementing complex abstractions.
And all that extra complexity must be dealt with using an antiquated
programming language with horrible syntax.

Yes, we could create some kind of simple emulator that makes it possible to
write simple things as easily as they could be done in TI-BASIC. But what kid
wants to write a nibbles or mario clone when they can with a few finger taps
be playing a 3D shooter or racing game. The simple reality is that we are no
longer in the frontier days of computing, and I would argue that our languages
and abstractions haven't kept pace with other advancements. The easy things
have all been done. And the interesting things that haven't been done are
hard. That has a significant role in what the author is talking about.

There are also other forces at play--such as the very large economic interests
that exist around programming iOS--that weren't a factor for TI back in the
day. So while I'm all for the author's thesis that things should be more
explorable, I think he's ignoring the fact that a significant amount of
essential complexity has made that a much more difficult proposition than it
used to be.

------
drdaeman
I don't see any competition at programmable calculator's market.

Why noone gets a modern SoC, connects it to a modern OLED display (but keep
hardware keyboard, please), burns in basic DirectFB-based GNU userland with
tons of readily available free science (not only math) and programming tools,
designs an basic UI over the thing (most hard part), keeps the POSIX shell
available and device completely unlocked, and starts selling the product? I do
believe there are parents who would like their kid to have a good calculator
to aid in the school, but don't want them to have an iOS/Android tablet (as
it's more likely the kid will end up playing or using it for social networks).

I mean, replace everything that sucks about graphing calculators - outdated
(and seriously overpriced) hardware and limited programming and debugging
functionality (if you're about to argue - please compare TI calculator to your
development workstation to see what I mean), but keep the device feel
generally science- rather than entertainment-oriented?

In short: a handheld device with a general feel of modern programmable
calculator, with (preinstalled) Maxima, Octave, PHYSICA, R, Python, Racket and
so on under the hood, and without any [readily available] "app store" full of
games.

Or such products do exist, but I just haven't stumbled on anything like this?

------
canadev
IMO, this is a beautiful article.

The author has a grasp of education that probably wouldn't have occurred to
me. I love the sentence "It may be tempting to see convention and subversion
as incompatible, but education thrives in the healthy tension between the
two."

I personally learned to program nearly 20 years ago, when I was 13. I was
fortunate enough to have a computer around the house and was pretty familiar
with MS-DOS and the various conventional memory incantations required to run
Games, and I'd played around with GW-BASIC but my family was visiting some
relatives' house where I found and picked up what I consider to be one of the
most formative books of my life: C for Dummies. For some time, we'd had a copy
of Borland C lying around the house, and a copy of K&R, but I could not get
into it, though I'd made a few stalled attempts. But this book... it brought
the computer alive for me.

Fast forward to today, I am technically self employed, though most of my work
is a full-time contract with a single company, and I make a low six figure
income. All because I learned to play and experiment with that beautiful thing
called programming, because of C for Dummies. Dan Gookin (the author) changed
my life, in much the same way that the article's author was changed by the
discovery of the programming tools for the graphing calculator.

I am a high school dropout, and very nearly failed out of two universities
before completing my bachelor's in Comp Sci after 8 years of attempts. I have
historically had a tough time of conventional learning, though I believe I've
matured enough for this to have changed over the last few years. Programming
taught me discovery, experimentation, a whole, whole lot of getting shit
wrong, how to figure out solutions to poorly defined problems (which usually
first requires coming up with a proper definition of the problem), and so much
more.

Programming is a beautiful thing. My friends just had a baby girl and at their
baby shower they had a little 'time capsule' where people could leave notes
for the baby to read in the coming years. Mine said that I would be happy to
teach her how to program.

For me, programming is a big part of life!

Finally, I love the fact that a non-professional programmer embraces and sees
the value in this.

------
lunixbochs
For anyone nostalgic about TI-BASIC, I implemented the 83/84 variant a while
back:
[https://github.com/lunixbochs/pitybas](https://github.com/lunixbochs/pitybas)

It lacks advanced math tokens and graph screen IO, but it's incredibly easy to
extend and emulates much of the language's quirky behavior.

(-> terminates the token stack, end quotes are optional, you can use "If;
End", order of operations, matrices, lists, menus)

There's a VT100 terminal output module which allows you to play home screen
games like Mofrog, but I haven't implemented a graph screen IO module yet.

You can run arbitrary .BAS files found on the internet.

------
kabdib
I'm going to have a hard time with this when the school district mandates that
my son use a calculator that has an "Equals" key.

We've always been an HP family. RPN all the way. I literally am unable to use
a TI calculator (well, they may well have Enter keys now -- I know the newer
HP calcs have Equals keys of a sort, which you can ignore). My son will not be
using a scientific calculator as broken as the TI ones.

You think I'm joking. I'm not. (I'll probably have to relent and let him use a
TI, but I'm going to show him RPN first...)

~~~
xradionut
So he thinks his Pop is on top of the stack?

------
xlayn
What if that liberty, that sense of discovering how to change it was not an
intended side effect, and the more controlled ipad environment is?

agree that exposure to that "primitive" environment and the desire to create
something great would force the user to make use of ingenuity. agreed that
incredibly constrained tools and no very high level language is included, yet
still reducing high level problems to low level instructions can allow to
discover and see something that could have been hidden by better tools.

or can it be just nostalgia?

------
egb
My kid just got a school-issued iPad in 5th grade. Awesome!

But he's also required to buy a lame-o TI calculator as well?! Why?! Oh,
because the standardized testing companies are freaked out by iPads.

TI has a stranglehold because of a lack of wifi???

How can we get iPads accepted as legit devices to use while taking tests? I'm
getting flashbacks to all the open vs closed book debates about testing that I
went through in high school and college...

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
How can we get iPads accepted as legit devices to use while taking tests?

Remove the ability to communicate, boot it to a standard image that doesn't
allow cheats.

~~~
egb
It sucks that googling for something counts as cheating, when really it's a
skill that applies to about 90% of real life :-)

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
Last year I caught two students IM'ing during a final.

Most of my exams are open book, open note; so I am not unsympathetic to the
realities of how a real job is[1].

[1] source: I used to have a real job.

~~~
egb
I agree that "asking a friend" is not legit and would be cheating, but using
google to find something is more like open book testing.

The closest thing I could think of would be to set the iPad into Guided Access
mode where you can't exit an app at all, but having teachers do that to every
kid's iPad would take a while...

------
wsc981
When I read about the language TI-BASIC in the above article, it reminded me
of my old TI-99/4A computer[0], which I got from my dad to learn programming.
This computer also included a TI-BASIC language, I wonder if they are in any
way related, except of course from being a BASIC language created by Texas
Instruments. It would be cool if old TI-99/4A games would be playable on
"modern" TI graphic calculators.

I still have two TI-99/4A computers in my cellar, for nostalgic reasons :)

[0]:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_TI-99/4A](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_TI-99/4A)

------
ibrahima
Holy crap, I played Desolate, that game was seriously amazing for a
calculator. The graphics rivaled the original Game Boy (a decade later, but
still). It was seriously smooth and well made.

------
forgottenpaswrd
Graphic calculators are totally obsolete now.

You could run circles around it with a Nintendo DS with homebrew, Sony hand
held consoles and of course the Ipad, Iphone or Android.

But don't expect to convince your 50-60 year old teachers in University to let
you use it. In spite of showing the apps that I had done for structural
analysis in my Nintendo DS, they could not let me use it, I had to buy one of
those stupid, overpriced, obsolete graphic calculators.

------
xradionut
Never really had a graphing calculator when I was in school. Bought 92 Plus
years later just to have a ultraportable "computer" for field work. LCD screen
is starting to decay after years of use, so I picked up another in "mint"
condition for $40 at a used book store.

Would love to take the old one and replace the screen and processor with
something more modern, keeping the keyboard.

------
bluetshirt
Is a graphing calculator really the most obvious way that a young and
impressionable mind will find an inroads to programming in this day and age? I
find that idea laughable. Tinkering on the web is the obvious modern-day
equivalent that is completely neglected when talking about how hostile the
modern environment is towards the young creative spirit.

~~~
jlgreco
It is easier to lug a graphing calculator around than a laptop, particularly
in schools. I spent countless hours programming on my calculator while sitting
in cars, hiding in the back pews at church, inside of tents during camping
trips, sitting in the back row of classrooms,...

It was something I could do that caught my attention while forced to be
someplace I had no interest in being. I don't think web development gets you
that.

~~~
bluetshirt
Oh, it completely does. My niece this year is required to have a laptop for
school. She _has_ to have a PC with her. Now, she has no interest or aptitude
for programming, but if any of her classmates do, they can easily fire up a
web browser and get to hacking, even without an Internet connection.

~~~
jlgreco
That is rather alien to me, but I am pretty certain it is not the norm (my old
school-district, where my mother is still a teacher, certainly doesn't have
anything like that). Even so, I doubt an English teacher would take kindly to
her pulling out her laptop in the middle of class... I've had plenty of
_university_ professors that would freak out if you tried that.

(Also keep in mind, that for most of the time-periods when calculator hacking
was popular, web development was also a thing (I was heavily into this stuff
during the late 90s and very early 00's). I did that stuff in highschool but
it simply didn't interest me in the same way. Calculators were limited, and
that presented both a challenge and a goalpost. Doing the same stuff with
webdev? That is mundane and discouraging because you know that, at an entry
level, you are not exploring the bounds of the medium in any meaningful way..

It is like the difference between seeing how fast you can go down a hill on a
skateboard, and how fast you can go on the highway with your mother's minivan.
Rotate a few triangles with webgl... or optimize a trig table in z80
assembly....

When I came home at the end of the day, I would fire up my PC and started
editing some z80 assembly on it instead of programming the computer itself.
Hell, I would test on a calculator emulator running on the PC...)

~~~
bluetshirt
Web development in the 90s and early 00s was not a practical substitute for
learning how to program. Now, it is.

You make a claim that the low-level nature of the calculator programming was
an enticement to you. That may be, but I would hestitate to generalize based
on your own experiences. I would suspect that the ability to come up with
something that actually does something conventionally interesting trumps the
benefits of working close to the metal, ESPECIALLY with young, novice
programmers. A few hours of hacking in assembler and you may get to hello
world, whereas the same amount of effort in javascript might net you the
ability to drag and drop objects around a UI. Which is more impressive to a
kid?

~~~
jlgreco
> _Web development in the 90s and early 00s was not a practical substitute for
> learning how to program._

Of course it was... many people _did_ learn that way. If anything, it was more
accessible then than now. Actually, 'substitute' nothing, something that _is_
is not a substitute. That's not the point though, you _could_ teach middle-
schoolers to program with fucking Java if you wanted to, though of course you
shouldn't.

Say you're a teenager and what to program "Snake". Are you going to get up off
the ground with TI-BASIC or WebGL/whatever faster, and which is going to leave
you more satisfied. On a calculator you have pushed something to its limits
(in some limited way), with web-dev you have done nothing of the sort. Power
and raw capability is _not_ what you want from a teaching aid.

And to be clear, I am not arguing for a low-level next to the metal
introduction to programming. _(TI-BASIC is of course nothing of the sort.)_ I
am arguing for giving children a pair of boots that fit, not a pair of boots
suitable for industrial use. Something that they can properly fill out and
master. Something with bounds that they can strive for _and reach_. Something
that _forces_ them to get clever when they reach those bounds.

If you think this is a bizarre concept, then look at Logo.

------
kristoffer
I bought the TI-85 dispite it being an older model because it had been hacked
so I could program it in z80 assembler.

~~~
zokier
TI-86 can be programmed in asm without hacks (I had both 85 until it broke
down and 86).

------
Havoc
This must be an American thing.

 _All_ the exams I have ever written (grade 1 to post grad) specified graphing
calculators are prohibited. Every last one. Graphing calculators tend to be
programmable and/or can save text files & local educational institutions
didn't want to go there.

------
wyager
Perhaps the author's arguments about the benefits of graphing calculators are
legitimate, but there is no reason that this is specific to TI. TI 8*
calculators seem to me to be particularly overpriced and lacking in modern
features.

~~~
tantalor
Do you know an alternative which is cheaper or has the missing features?

~~~
Moto7451
Perfect for the majority of student uses:

[http://www.staples.com/Casio-FX-9750GII-Graphing-
Calculator/...](http://www.staples.com/Casio-FX-9750GII-Graphing-
Calculator/product_510052?cid=PS:GooglePLAs:510052&KPID=510052)

Aside from playing Ti 8* games. I'm not sure what engineers need in a
calculator so I can't comment on that, but in my use case (nearly a decade
ago) I could have gotten one of these and been just fine. I got a TI83 because
it was the standard issue.

In my own personal use (scientific calculators for hobbyist purposes) I've
switched to Casios since they just have outright nicer displays than the
selection of HPs and TIs at Fry's and they cost a bunch less.

------
davexunit
It's a shame that iPads are being pushed so heavily in the educational space.
Apple products are built upon denying users access to learn about the hardware
and software. Educators should be fighting against walled gardens.

------
bane
For those interested www.ticalc.org is an incredible archive dedicated to
these little computers.

I love TI calcs so much that the first app I install on a new phone are the TI
calc emulators.

------
eplumlee
Shows how much we've declined. Kids nowadays use graphing calculators in JHS
algebra. We had no calculators, and calculus in my JHS by the 10th grade.

------
rdl
What we really need is HyperCard for the iPad, ideally with a Parse-like
service to let you easily write network code, not crappy TI-Basic.

