[VA] A digression around a digression

[EdS2]

For me, the important thing here is that there is more than one way to enjoy our hobby, and none of those is right, or indeed wrong.

A person might enjoy the physicality and authenticity of the calculator itself: the feel, the smell, the sound, the display and the keyboard, the weight and balance.

A person might enjoy the facilities of the calculator: the functions, the features, the accuracy, the programmability.

The way I read C.Ret's original message, is that it was something of a spoiler to their enjoyment of the real article, with its relatively slow performance, when people using emulators could produce results and perform experiments so much faster.

It's a shame, that someone should feel this way, because i don't really see a way around it, other than to try to have some challenges and threads strictly disallow emulators. But as we've seen, instructions like that are not actually rules - people can do as they wish, and sometimes they will, whether through enthusiasm, or not-too-careful reading, or whatever reason.

It's not clear to me that one person can persuade another person that their way of enjoying the hobby could be changed - it's not clear to me that we can change our preferences just by deciding to.

However, i think we can try to understand each other, and understand the variety of experience, even if we can't feel it.

And we can be tolerant and forgiving, in case people do things which we would prefer they didn't do. I think in almost all cases, no harm is intended. We should always be generous in supposing what someone's motivation might be.