How much has RPN/RPL spoiled you?

[AnalogJoe]

I wrote a similar post recently and decided to start a new thread.

A bit of background:

When I was around 16 years old and in high school (im now 30) I asked my mother to buy me one of those "Graphing calculators", I really didnt ask for one in particular, I just wanted a graphing calculator, I didnt know anything about calculator brands or whatever.

My mother went to the store, and not knowing a single thing about calculators, somehow decided to buy me and HP 48G+ from all the available calculators at the time, that decision had a huge impact on me in the years to come. So when she gave me my new calculator, and I started using it, I was a bit disappointed, I mean it looked great, it had a huge screen and sure enough it could graph, but doing something as simple as the sum of two numbers was painful to me, it was until I read the manual that I found out it used RPN and everything was backwards.

I wasnt thrilled that my new calculator was "weird" and unusual, even more when I went to school the other day and I realized that I was one of the only kid's in class with an HP calc, the other kids had a TI and their graphing calc was "normal". I was about to tell my mom that she had made a bad decision, and that she should return the calculator back to the store, but for some reason I didnt and I stick with my HP calc.

I started learning more about the other features in the calculator and I began to get used to RPN, however when I had to take a test I would use my Casio scientific instead because I didnt feel confident using the HP RPN.

Months passed, and I dumped the Casio, now I didnt have to store every value, I could just leave it floating in the stack and use it whenever it was necessary, no more parenthesis! I was thrilled with my HP, then years went by and I truly appreciated the value of using lists in subjects such as statistics, RPL, complex matrices in EE subjects, etc.. and all the other great HP functions.

Now im studying a masters degree and realize that I cant live without RPN or HP for that matter, the only time I dont use RPN is when im using Matlab or a similar program. I will definitely use Matlab for the 'heavier' calculations, but when it comes to crunching numbers, nothing beats the speed of a handheld calculator

If somehow I forget my calculator and have to borrow one, Ill be completely crippled, even common arithmetic operations are a pain to perform, Ill constantly get "syntax error" by subconsciously trying to use a simple Casio in RPN mode. I realized that I depend on HP calculators in order to be efficient, I still can get the job done with a simple Casio but it feels like a real struggle to get it done.

I dont know if this is a good or a bad thing, all im know is that I really need to have my HPs around. I like the recent HP products like the 35s and Prime, and both are still RPN (the Prime is not 100% RPN, but it is RPN where RPN is the most useful, in the crunching numbers aka 'home' window) but the day HP stops making RPN calculators, is the day I will stop buying new HP calculators, no matter how good they are.

Im just too much in to RPN to ever go back to the ALG way.

P.S. Thanks mom!!!!!!!!

I would love to read your thoughts and experiences