Nspire Saga: TI Reaches Out
Published by KermMartian 12 years, 9 months ago (2011-06-02T19:58:36+00:00) | Discuss this article

In what is certainly a change of heart from their previous policy of ignoring the community's cries for programming capabilities in the TI-Nspire graphing calculator, TI has taken a step towards reaching out to us. The TI-Nspire has been widely panned in the TI enthusiast community as a step forwards only in raw specifications and a step backwards in programmability. Over the past few months, the community has uncovered evidence of Lua programmability added in Nspire OS 3.0, even as the debacle of downgrade protection and OS math bugs continues to rage. Cemetech has taken an outspoken stand against the Nspire in favor of the Casio Prizm, a $120, color-screened calculator that is relatively trivial to program in C, made even easier by the PrizmSDK created by Jonimus and Tari. TI has taken the step of sending Cemetech (via myself) the following letter, and the ticalc.org staff has indicated that they received a similar piece of correspondence. To whit:

Christopher,

I know that you have communicated with us in the past about programming on the TI-Nspire. I am writing to let you know that the TI-Nspire now has a scripting capability that is public.

The tools and documentation are available at http://education.ti.com/nspire/scripting.

These are initial resources but we wanted to get them out there so that people could begin to take advantage of them. There are future improvements in the works, so the development and definition team would like to get your feedback (there is a link to the team on the web page above).

We are excited about the possibilities of scripting for the TI-Nspire platform. We look forward to seeing what you and the Cemetech community come up with and in working with you to improve the scripting capabilities over time.

Regards,

Dave Santucci
Product Line Strategy
Texas Instruments
Education Technology


What do you think? Have you tried the Lua programming yet? Does this make up for the lack of an I/O-complete BASIC language on the Nspire and the absense of C and ASM programmability? Please post your comments in the attached topic.

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