Prime vs Excel, IDE...

[compaqdrew]

So I've been living with my Prime for a few weeks now and I'm trying to develop an intuition for when to use it (or any calculator) vs something like Excel or a "real" programming environment. I'd like to compare notes with people who know the calculator better. For background I'm a software engineer so a lot of my day-to-day problems are light calculus, geometry, and simple to not-so-simple programming.

The best case seems to be graphing. Geometry in particular seems to blow away other tools I've used like Geogebra, Demos, etc. I've struggled to take those beyond toy math problems and into programming my own object definitions for my problems. HP really shines here.

CAS is similarly great. Of course it's no Wolfram but it's a lot cheaper and less hassle for the vast majority of the time I need a closed-form integral of a simple function.

I'm less confident about the rest though. e.g. Inference app is perfectly serviceable, but it's tough to beat software like Wizard for quickly comparing two populations.

I'm still trying to form a view of programming. Today I wrote my first nontrival program, since I need to figure estimated taxes. It was a great excuse to learn PPL and pretend I'm not doing taxes. I'm not sure it compares favorably to either Excel or a real programming environment though. For want of a keyboard I used my computer, but it's weird programming in a tiny window without autocomplete, unit tests, versioning, or even the ability to write help for my function. The upside is I can integrate my taxes or intersect them with a triangle which is cool I guess. Practically though I wasn't able to leverage much from the calculator and I'm a bit uncertain about whether it's worth writing the little programs I use day to day.

It would help to have better programming support. I know Python is popular but if I were in charge I'd be looking into js/wasm. Wasm would connect the Prime to the dozens of languages that compile to wasm already, and very elegantly solves tricky questions like "how much python to support" and "how to call builtin functions".

Spreadsheet app is a total mystery to me. I have no idea why you would use it over Excel. For the CAS functions I suppose, but I have yet to figure out what a CAS spreadsheet is for.

I don't want to complain too much, it's a great calculator. I think my expectations were high though, from using calculators years ago in school. I wanted a general-purpose environment where I could dump all my formulas and little programs to use throughout the day, compose them together, relate them, etc. Prime seems a bit more special-purpose than that as a tool.

Curious to see what those with more time on the calculator think. When do you find yourself reaching for Prime/calculator vs Excel or IDE?