Re: galculator should be included in Gnome [OT rant]

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Sat, 2003-04-26 at 22:16, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 26, 2003 at 05:07:54PM -0400, Owen Taylor wrote:
> > 
> > While the concept of copying a simple 4 function calculator may have
> > a bit of merit - people are familiar with that - copying a physical
> > calculator really is a entirely broken way of presenting a interface
> > for interactive calculations.
> >
> ... 
> > There are a lot of examples of interfaces that could serve as
> > prior art - bc, Mathematica, shell-mode in emacs, etc, etc. Many of
> > them admittedly, are experts-only or simply hideous.
> 
> If you copied a TI-81 sort of physical calculator, those are already a
> mathematical shell sort of like bc/matlab/something, rather than the
> old school kind of physical calculator these apps are similar to.

Certainly, the "graphing calculator" is a better model than an old-
fashioned scientific calculator; they do have command line history,
real variable names, etc.

But I still think that approaching an interface as a copy of a graphing
calculator doesn't go far enough in the direction of thinking 
about "what is the right interface for calculation when you have
a million pixels, a keyboard and a mouse". 

And modern graphing calculators are pretty unbounded in their
capabilities, having symbolic computation, full featured programming
languages, etc, all packed into a dinky little interface. So,
I think you have to think *smaller* than that too to get something
that people can sit down with and just start using.

> I do think it's right to copy the physical calculator up to a point,
> for the basic keypad to just do a multiplication or whatever.  At the
> same time I find it hard to imagine using registers by hand when I
> have a high-level interpreted language available. ;-)

I think the copy of the physical calculator wins only when:

 A) The operation being done is simple enough that the user
    knows how to do it immediately looking at the physical 
    calculator (0 learning cost)

 B) The time spent using the application is short enough that
    any time at all spent learning a new interface outweighs
    any possible advantages from a better interface.

That certainly does cover a swath of uses, so yes, the four
function calculator clone probably does make sense, but
gnome-calculator is already too complicated.

Regards,
                                            Owen

[
  One thing I should mention is, that there is, of course,
  already command line math tool by a well known GNOME
  hacker -  http://www.5z.com/jirka/genius.html - though
  it isn't really along the lines of my contention that
  a command line math tool can be *easier* to use than
  a calculator mockup.
]