The actuel Prime future...

[parisse]

I also believe it is important to teach students not to be passive knowledge consumers, but to be active learners. Being active does not mean play with some applet someone else has designed to focus on one aspect of maths in the way the applet designer thought about it and you can't change. It really means learn how to be independant and this implies a real freedom for students to program the device. If they choose to stick with the user language, that's fine, but they should also have the freedom to program it at full speed. That was the magic of the hp48g family with user RPL and system RPL. That's what ndless enables on the TI nspire. Unfortunately education institutions and the calc companies have decided to push the test mode "feature" in more and more countries (e.g. France in 2018), and this is against this freedom: you won't see SDK like the system RPL SDK on the 48.
One might think, it's not important, since everyone can program freely on a computer. But I think it misses one important point : many good programmers learned programming on calcs. I thought it was not true anymore, but from a topic on tiplanet forum I discovered it seems to be still true, perhaps because the calc is always available at school, perhaps because the learning curve is much smaller before you can really master the thing and show something to your classmates than on a PC. Now they won't anymore, even in the user language, because memory will be erased each time they enter test mode (the only motivation to program will now probably be cheating).
The short-minded educators and businessmens won this round, computer science and engineers lost it. Is the battle really over?