What calculator is an aid to you as a programmer?

Question

I have decided to break down, and buy a calculator to use at work. One that I can hold in my hand. The features I want involve HEX/OCT/DEC/BIN conversion, and the basic statistical functions and solar/battery power.

I am primarily a CRUD programmer, I also do a little statistics work from time to time.

The question is three fold.

What other calculator features are of benefit to you at your job? What calculator would you recommend? What factors am I overlooking?

EDIT: While there are indeed a wealth of programs out there, I am looking for advice on the sort of calculator you can hold in your hand.

Answer 1

I just use the Windows/Ubuntu calculator. If that fails, use Excel/OpenOffice Spreadsheet.

Spreadsheets are far more useful as a scratchpad for calculations than any calculator.

Answer 2

The only thing a hand held calculator gains me is portability, instant on (no boot time) and I can poke it's buttons faster than I can mouse. From that, I tend to use a calculator when I don't have a computer for for fairly trivial things. I very rarely do any programming stuff without a computer handy and I can't think of anything that is specific to programing that I would class as trivial so I'm not sure if there is anything you could make a hand held calculator do that would be of any benefit to me (or enough I would pay anything extra for) with regards to programming.

The windows calculator (or just about any hand-held one) does fine for me on simple things. For everything else: Excel, MathCAD or something else like that. I don't think I would have use for anything in between.

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old:

I'm not sure a hand held calculator could be of an specific use to me for programming (as in "Oh this will be nice when I'm programming") OTOH I do use one for general stuff and sometime that ends up being programming, but still nothing peculiar to programming.

Answer 3

I have a extended RPN calculator on my phone (WM5-based) and bc is nice on UNIXes.

Answer 4

Why not use the computer? My favorite calculator is the TI-84 Plus Silver Edition:

http://education.ti.com/educationportal/sites/US/productDetail/us_ti84pse.html

Obviously, as everyone probably knows, it's very easily programmed.

Also, I typically use Google's calculator for most calculations I do on the fly.

Answer 5

I would go for a standard, cheap, good old brand X scientific calculator. About 15 euros. And I would use bc, octave, matlab, python, R, whatever, when I need anything more than log(123+456).

Answer 6

I use SpeedCrunch, or GNU octave for heavier tasks.

Answer 7

Google works fantastically well as a calculator, as does the search bar. In Firefox 3 it will give you mathematical answers as the first "suggestion" in the drop down even without hitting enter.

It does unit conversions, too.

Answer 8

Did you try calc mode in emacs? It takes time to learn it, but it is very powerful.

Answer 9

I still have an ancient TI-35-Plus which keeps going on its original battery after all these years, since only maybe every couple of months I will turn it on and do a Hex<>Decimal conversion. Plus which it does fit into your shirt-pocket.

Answer 10

I have three favorites:

1. TI-83
2. XP PowerToys PowerCalc
3. HP Reverse Polish Calculators

Answer 11

If you're primarily programming in a scripting language, you may find the scripting language interpreter itself makes a good calculator.

I used to use the unix "bc" calculator. These days for most simple calculations, I launch python.

For more complex calculations, a spreadsheet is probably a better tool.

Answer 12

On Ubuntu I use Qalculate (http://qalculate.sourceforge.net/). Excellent calculator.

Answer 13

I use an HP-48 for doing most heavy-duty work (I'm a grad student in chemistry) since I think in RPN. For light-duty stuff I just use a cheap TI solar scientific calculator. It's great for doing simple jobs like converting numbers and I won't shed too many tears if I lose it or spill stuff on it.

If it's for work, I'd err on the side of cheaper in case it disappears. I'd also consider getting something that uses batteries instead of solar. It's annoying when your calculator resets and loses your last result because some sheets of paper covered it.

If you need some heavy-duty statistics power, the HP-48 has specialized cards that you can buy. You might also go the high-end TI route. I'm not as familiar with the TIs, but I'd bet that there are software packages available for them as well.

Answer 14

I use an interactive python interpreter.

Answer 15

I find spreadsheet in any even simplest form to be most effective. It is easy to work on large data sets with just few clicks, and easy to parametrize the equations, break them apart and so on.

Answer 16

Old HP RPN calculators, like the 12C and 15C.

Answer 17

TI-84 Silver Edition is the calculator that helped me survive Differential Equations. I grew quite attached to mine. It still lives in my desk at home.

If, for some reason, you decide that you don't want a "hold in your hand" kind of calculator, I recommend GraphCalc.

Answer 18

Formulas for Mac. Very cool: set variables, lots of built-in functions, intuitive to use.

Answer 19

I use a Casio fx-85WA. I've found it has always been sufficient for the calculations I've needed to do, and it's not overcomplicated with graphing functions that I find I don't need very often as a developer.

Answer 20

c:\windows\system32\calc.exe

The advanced setting of the calculator helps with RGB colour formats and HEX codes.

Answer 21

I use Octave http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/ It's fairly heavy duty but I find it more Convenient then carying a scientific calculator around with me all the time. It's ability to convert between different number bases is also helpful.

Answer 22

I wouldn't use a hand-held calculator at my desk unless I was doing some calculation with a long list of numbers on paper. That said, my general purpose calculator is the one in my mobile phone. :-) But I have an HP-48 for when that's a bit too clunky.

Whilst programming, I usually just use the MySQL CLI I always have open.

Answer 23

Unix?

$ bc -l

Answer 24

There is some controversy over my downvoting in this question. I will explain my reasoning by quoting Jef Raskin, the late usability expert, and originator of the macintosh project at apple.

Calculator or Computer? It's true, Many of us keep a calculator beside our computers. Why do you need this simple-minded device when you have a whole computer in front of you? You need it because you have to go through contortions worthy of a circus sideshow in order to do simple arthmetic with the computer. There you are, tapping away at your word processsor, when you want to do a division: 375 packages of Phumoxx cost $248.93; what is the price for one package? On my computer, I have to open up a calculator window. To do this, I move my hand from the keyboard to the mouse, which I use to do a click-and-drag to open the calculator. Transferring my hands back to the keyboard, I type in the numbers I need or tediously cut and paste them from my document. Then I have to press a few more keys and finally copy the results from the calculator window into my document. Sometimes, the calculator window opens right on top of the very numbers I need, just to add insult to injury. In that case, I must use the mouse to move the calculator window out of the way before proceeding. It is much faster to grab the pocket calculator.

do not think just because you are a programmer you are immune to usability issues. Using a software calculator can be a significant drain on your time, and when you're a professional software developer, time is some serious money, yo.

Jef Raskin went on to propose a solution for a better software calculator. I did not downvote those that I thought were similar enough to Raskin's solution, such as using spotlight. If you're using Textmate, textmate has a feature which is almost EXACTLY the solution that Raskin proposed, that is, you highlight a text which represents a mathematical operation, and you press the "calculate" key on the keyboard. Since most keyboards sadly lack a "calculate" key, in textmate you use control+shift+c instead. All text editors should have this feature. it is sad if they don't.

Also, his son aza made a program called enso. If you have enso installed, you can highlight a calculation, (anywhere in windows), hold down the capslock key and type "calc", and it will perform the calculation, replacing the selected text with the result.

the quote continues

Using an experienced computer and calculator operator as my test subject, with his word processing program open before him, I measured the total time it took for him to pick up a calculator, turn it on, do a simple addition, and return his hands to the keyboard to resume typing. It took about 7 seconds. I then measured the time it took for him to use the built-in calculator. He had to move the cursor to the menu bar at the top of the screen, find the calculator program, open the calculator, enter the sum, and then click back in the word processor so that he could resume typing. This took about 16 seconds.

Answer 25

OS X's Spotlight has a calculator in it (I think it may have been an addition with Leopard) and I use it for my summation needs.

Answer 26

I have found, in my roughly thirty years as a programmer, that I almost never use a calculator. I had fancy calculators in high school and college, and I kept them plus bought others with the expectation of using them throughout my career, but it just has not manifested. I keep a calculator in my briefcase, and I have replaced it a few times over the past couple of decades, but I never pull it out to use it.

On rare occasion, I find myself opening the OS-provided calculator, but that is maybe a handful of times per year. I use spreadsheets to keep track of my billable hours, which is where most of my calculating goes. Beyond that, I maybe do a calculation based on the price of something listed on a web site, or check some figures relating to my pay stub.

However, I practically never find myself doing calculations related to my actual programming, unless I am actually programming those calculations (meaning that I am writing code, but not actually plugging in the numbers myself).

So, I never touched my fancy calculators again, and I have never used a computer-based calculator long enough to care about its UI.

Answer 27

bc(command line calculator) on linux

Answer 28

I mostly just use the calculator app on my computer. However, I also have an ancient Casio calculator watch that happens to do binary/octal/hex (it's 27 function scientific calculator). I think they quit making them about 15 years ago, but if you can still find one, they're quite nice!