The Prime is just an Expensive Toy

[medwatt]

(12-13-2019 03:56 PM)Claudio L. Wrote:  

(12-08-2019 04:47 PM)medwatt Wrote:  ... the Ti-89 can do more than the Prime simply because you can find a package for almost anything on the Ti-89...

... There's an app out there that can do just that ...

I think these 2 short quotes summarize the reason of your frustration. Your expectation wasn't met because there simply isn't an electrical engineering community built around the Prime.
This is not a deficiency on the device, it's a sign of the times. The HP50g and TI89's fully compatible ancestors were born at a time where when you bought a computer and turned it on, all you saw on the screen was a prompt and a blinking cursor. You were forced to read, educate yourself first, then use the machine, and by "using" I mean starting your BASIC/Pascal/C interpreter/compiler and coding your own programs or using somebody else's hand-coded programs. Same thing for calculators: people read, got educated and started creating their own programs, sharing them with a large community of professionals doing the same.

Fast forward to after 2010: People expect to use a device using nothing but their intuition. Read? Learn? how antiquated. They also expect the device to have an existing online repository of programs already coded and working to solve their every problem, because nobody bothers getting their hands dirty and coding anything anymore. This is a generation of "downloaders", that expect everything to be already done and served on a silver platter in a matter of 2 clicks.
The HP Prime was simply born too late to develop that kind of repository because nowadays people want that repository to "simply exists" as if it took no effort to create one. It has no backwards compatibility to any "ancestor", so there's no big repository.

This is ALSO the reason why everybody wants Python. No, Python is not superior to any other language. Once you learn one or 2 coding languages you realize they are all very similar, and with a couple of hours to familiarize yourself with the syntax you could be using ANY language in no time (including PPL). Then why Python? Because... they want to download the code already written! People nowadays can't be bothered to port a simple subroutine from one language to another, they just want to download it and have it running on a single click. They don't want Python to code in Python, merely to download existing Python code and run it. And because Python is popular, the repository is large.

So don't try to explain this user the pros and cons of a device. Unless he gets a big repository where he can download his app to do Bode plots and Fourier transforms with an intuitive UI he will not be satisfied. It's just a generational thing.

This is really a very tired argument: "If you want something, code it yourself." How many times have I heard it before? It's a super ironical thing to say when probably 99% of almost everything you rely upon in your daily life is the finished work of others. The human race would simply not be where it is today if it wasn't for the fact that people need to specialize. I don't know how to build a microprocessor. Should that prevent me from ever using a computer ? We simply don't have the time to indulge in everything.

Let's get back to the topic at hand. You say, with a huge does of disdain, that people want Python on the calculator not because they care about Python, but because they want to use the huge repository that is already available. This is precisely the reason why people want Python. Why should I or others be always reinventing the wheel ? I do not do programming for a living (unless VHDL is also programming). I encounter needs for some programming during my studies and if some people had already taken their time to implement and made it available, why shouldn't I take advantage of that ? I have no doubt that if you spend a few hours a day to learn how to build a chair, you could build a chair in a one week. Why don't you do it? You probably either don't have the time or you believe people who are more specialized in carpentry can build a chair better than you can ever do.

In conclusion, my advice to you is for you to step back and read what you wrote, realize how ironical it sounds and stop with this holier than thou attitude. Some of your arguments make you sound like an old man complaining how bad the youth of today is compared to yesteryear.