Plus42 Pricing and documentation

[Thomas Okken]

(11-28-2023 05:10 PM)bxparks Wrote:  I suppose the question that I should have asked more directly is: *Why* should I learn RPL? It seems like a technological dead end to me, if no current calculator uses it. Judging from the size of the SysRPL reference manual, RPL may have collapsed under the weight of its own complexity.

Programmable calculators had their heyday roughly from the late '70s to the early '90s. They became popular because they were an affordable way to automate complex calculations, for people who didn't have access to computers, when computers cost a fortune and took up a large room.

Once PCs became inexpensive, most of the market for programmable calculators disappeared. What was left were markets where portability was important, like education and engineers working in the field. And those markets gradually got eaten up by handheld computers, i.e. PDAs and smartphones.

I don't think there's anything wrong with RPL per se, it's just that it represents a solution to a problem that no longer exists. Almost anything you can do in RPL, you could also do in C or Java or C# or Mathematica.

No software system collapses under the weight of its complexity, that's just not a thing. If you think the RPL documentation is intimidating, that's nothing compared to the documentation of a modern computer system with its languages and libraries. Even back in the '90s, the full documentation set for a Sun workstation would take up half a bookcase.

Having said all that, programmable calculators still have their uses. That's why this forum is still active, and that's why I wrote Free42 and Plus42. Personally, I prefer Plus42 over RPL calculators, but I'm not going to say that anyone who prefers RPL is wrong. The fact that HP no longer sells RPL calculatos is just because the market for these machines has become too small to be interesting to them, not because there's no use for those devices at all any more.