My software design / AP computer science teacher loves that the z80 calculators have any sort of program-ability on them at all. When you sign up for the class, one of the things she asks what languages you have coded in. One of the examples is the calculator. I'd be interested in seeing what her opinion on this is, because I'm sure most of the people wanting to take her class are either (unfortunately) wanting to play games, or started on their calculators.

Back when I was a young calculator newbie, my friend and I would work on random games. It seems I must have read more tutorials or something, because I excelled at it much, much faster than he. But all the same, we would have small little "competitions" as we were out on our walk we had to do. The majority of the walk was spent thinking of ideas to compete using, and then we would go in class and at the end of the day try and show off the programs we created. I think that was another key factor to me wanting to get into programming: I had to beat my friend at something He's a super genius, great at math, great at science, etc. So I had something to go against him, and my calculator had a great way of getting me interested in a way to beat him.

I also extremely credit Catalog Help for my beginning programming. I could sit and look at the definition of the syntax, and then write a few programs to see if I could get it to do what I wanted. I think I learned For loops with Catalog Help, and probably more. Like the string commands that TI hides from us in a separate menu. Having all of the commands in one place (catalog) really made it easy to just run through, pick a command I've never heard of, and press [+] to see the definition.

Probably off-topic, meh.

@Souvik: Yes, they have, but they have provided little or no support of them recently, nor documented any of the specifics to us. I'm pretty sure that BrandonW knows of an exact USB document that would literally save him (and the rest of the community) hundreds or thousands of hours of reverse engineering work that TI refuses to release. Their current trend is to abandon any pretense of caring about the community, the students, or their non-commercial responsibilities, and with the death-grip they have on the market, there's currently very little reason for them to stop.

@Qazz: I don't think it's quite as dire as you put it, but you're sadly probably not that far off.

@_player: Not off-topic at all, thanks for sharing that story.

@Lionel: An extremely well-written and heartfelt post, thanks for sharing. You're a great example of the free development work that goes on; it's well-documented how many inefficiencies and bugs that TI-Connect has, not to mention that it doesn't even run on *nix platforms. I agree that it would send a fairly powerful message to run CAS OSes on non-CAS calculators, but I worry that that might increase hostility further with TI and give their executives more reasons to tell the design and programming teams to lock down the device as much as possible. I wish I could find some important person in TI's educational division who cares.

eh, perhaps, but I stick by what I say I seriously think TI will never get better until their current head-honcho is dead or retired... (Let su hope for the latter `-`)

An interesting point, actually; do we in fact know who is in power in the TI educational division?

You can put my signature on that as well. I am all in favor. I'll be right up there with you against TI, Kerm.

Wait, this is a petition? I wanna sign!

Me too.

Thanks guys. I think that the idea that's developing is writing an open letter based on this and finding a way to share it with TI executives and with teachers and educators.

I'm thinking of something: several of us have started posting about our TI calculators programming experience as a starting point to wider programming activities.
What about collecting a database of dozens of similar testimonials ?

If I didnt find out about calculator programming I would still be an unstable screwup

If you need help, I'm willing. I'm a pretty good writer myself.




I can even take care of this.

That's what I can see.

By the way, in case it wasn't clear, please put my signature there too

But we also haven't seen the CX yet. Why not give it a chance and if it is bad, switch to the Prizm? The original Nspire hardly had any programming also. But Ndless came about and we got all sorts of awesome programs.

It is already confirmed there is no good programming for it :/ there is no point

That's playing devil's advocate with the actual devil.

ParkerR, we've already gotten confirmation from multiple sources. And I'm not jsut picking specific complaints with the CX, more what the CX represents in terms of TI's general attitude. ACagliano and Lionel, I vote we continue collecting quotes and testimonials in this thread, and that someone (I'd be willing to do it if no one else has such an inclination) collect and collate them as we go.

I would be willing to help with that process.

Awesome, thanks! So before we get too sidetracked with logistical details, let's see if we can get back to the issue at hand. Many of you seem to agree with large swathes of what I said, how about some disagreement? Do any of you feel that I was off-base with my criticisms or conclusions?

I don't think that it's necessarily TI's social responsibility to encourage or promote programming through their calculators.

I personally would get the TI-Nspire CX. I'm not too interested in Basic programming on either one at this point; I'd rather do C and assembly programming. Neither calculator officially supports C/asm, so both have to be hacked. I'd much rather take the one with the ARM processor (much more fun to program in than SH3 imo) and 64MB RAM. Plus, the "aircraft carrier" comparison doesn't really apply to the TI-Nspire CX.