Why are the HP Prime and HP-35s so unpopular?

[David Hayden]

I like the Prime a lot, even though it's a big departure from RPN and RPL, it's what a modern calculator should be (backlit color screen, multi-touch, modern programming language, fast, lots of memory, I/O).

The 35s is a great form factor, the keyboard is pretty nice and the display is good, but it's incredibly slow for when it was made. The lack of P->R and R->P commands is mystifying, as is the inability to extract the parts of an imaginary number.

But my biggest complaint with the 35s is the lack of labels. Sure you can GTO and XEQ a line number, but that only helps if you've already written that line! In other words, it's nearly impossible to branch forward. You can write a dummy branch, then add the rest of the code, and then modify the branch. Now let's see, if I delete a branch at line 12 that went to line 19, that moves line 19 to line 18, so does the new branch go to line 18 or 19? Hmm...

And if you branch to a line within another label, the code that adjusts your branches as you code them won't work. Ack! It's like they wanted to give us that HP-25 programming feel with 30kb of memory.

What would have been really nice is if you could use the 26 labels for branch targets, and then delete the labels, causing the program to automatically change branches to go to the correct line number. Now THAT would have been useful.

So as a programming vehicle, it's about as useful as a 32s because of the lack of labels.