Is RPN still relevant?

[cjsuk]

Interesting this one. A recent observation...

I'm doing a mathematics (second) degree at the moment with Open University. The students are all told to use Casio fx-85. They changed the design recently and now none of the material works for the new calculators. This has caused a lot of struggles for both students and staff. If you teach people how to use specific calculators, this is what you get and I suspect that's the problem with the education system at the moment. As a social outcast of both an RPN calculator user and macOS user, I'm on my own because the tuition is specialised and the knowledge is not. And that dissuades people from using whatever machine works for them and propels the decline from generalised calculation into machine operators.

Throw back 25 years and the previous engineering degree didn't even mention a calculator. Just use whatever. And that whatever was an HP48!

Either way, RPN (and RPL) is still relevant but the education system is the market that drives trends in this space and it's breeding machine operators not mathematicians, engineers and generalised knowledge.

As for average school kids, my youngest, 11, doesn't use a calculator at school. They haven't got that far yet. She was hammering away on my 32Sii no problems at all in 2 minutes doing multi-stage calculations and worked out the stack. It's how you explain it that matters.