I still hear about people who prefer slide rules (over calculators), or derivative tables (over symbolic calculators), or steam tables (over CAD), or cameras with film (over digital), or dumb phones (over smart phones), etc.. These people just love the tools that they've known; it's part of their workflow, and they wouldn't be happy with a change even if there were some utilitarian motivation for it.
And I'm sure we can find people who'll say that the slide rule will never go away. And maybe, to some extent, they're right?
Which is to say, I don't think everyone's going to give up the old stuff. I suspect that many people will allow the world pass them by. And I don't know if they're necessarily wrong, to live the way that they want. Just how I suspect this'll play out.
I grew up in the age of electronic calculators (graduated high school in 2004), and I think all high school students today should be forced to learn with slide rules, with handheld electronic calculators banned from classroom use for students aged 5–20.
The assignments given to high school students requiring high-precision calculations that cannot be done efficiently without a handheld electronic calculator are almost universally a pedagogically worthless waste of time. Most problems would benefit from being conceptually more interesting / more involved, but using simpler numbers.
Slide rules are much better tools than handheld calculators for giving students an intuitive understanding of the relevant mathematical functions, as well as learning about place value, numerical precision, .... The students who use slide rules are getting a better education, and wasting less of their time.
For high school work, the 2–3 digits of precision provided by a slide rule are entirely adequate, and with just a bit of practice they are very fast and effective practical tools, not appreciably slower than handheld calculators for basic use.
Any computation too demanding for a slide rule (e.g. physical simulations, statistical analysis, plotting complicated mathematical functions, ...) should be typed on a full-sized keyboard in a proper programming environment.
I also think younger students (3rd–8th grade) should be working with freeform counting boards, like the ones used in Ancient Greece/Rome and medieval Europe. IMO these are better preparation for algorithmic thinking than doing arithmetic using pen and paper. (Students should continue using pen and paper; just not exclusively.)
* * *
Smart phones are definitely a double-edged sword. They offer many wonderful conveniences, but they are also extremely addictive and are in practice also doing incredible damage to people’s a ability to concentrate, do creative work, maintain healthy face-to-face social relationships, get enough sleep, etc.
That's a great point about slide rules and precision. I wish more people understood it. I am sick of seeing statistics where n < 100 reported to 4 significant figures.
Agreed. My HS aged son does well in all of his math classes but is entirely dependent on his calculator to solve any given problem. I worry he will struggle as he reaches college level math since he hasn't ever internalized what the calculator is doing. He simply plugs in the numbers and gets an answer.
> These people just love the tools that they've known; it's part of their workflow, and they wouldn't be happy with a change even if there were some utilitarian motivation for it.
This is a pretty patronising way to talk about people who use feature phones and LaTeX. Newer, more powerful tools are not necessarily better. Just look at the web technology that HN runs on!
> Just look at the web technology that HN runs on!
Honestly, I'd prefer a version of HN that had some more modern features. It's the community that makes this place worthwhile.
I sometimes wonder if the folks behind HN keep the retro style to make that point about growing a community. This is, perhaps they're trying to say that a business's value isn't just in the technology, but also in the human capital? Or not to over-engineer a product when the current solution works?
I much prefer the user experience of HN to any other web forum. Everything loads instantly, everything has a URI, there are no extraneous distractions. I think the people behind HN just share my aesthetic preferences; they're not intentionally creating something they see as substandard.
I find the modern web insufferable. Personally, I prefer the style of hacker news. It’s a breath of fresh air compared to the rest of the bloated, vapid web. I like that some designer hasn’t gotten ahold of the style sheet and replaced all the content with whitespace.
LaTeX vs. WYSIWYG is more like a plain text programming language vs. a graphical one.
The more general the more complex a problem, the more likely plain text solutions win over solutions that might be more convenient in specialized cases.
I still hear about people who prefer slide rules (over calculators), or derivative tables (over symbolic calculators), or steam tables (over CAD), or cameras with film (over digital), or dumb phones (over smart phones), etc.. These people just love the tools that they've known; it's part of their workflow, and they wouldn't be happy with a change even if there were some utilitarian motivation for it.
And I'm sure we can find people who'll say that the slide rule will never go away. And maybe, to some extent, they're right?
Which is to say, I don't think everyone's going to give up the old stuff. I suspect that many people will allow the world pass them by. And I don't know if they're necessarily wrong, to live the way that they want. Just how I suspect this'll play out.