Best calculator for the working engineer

[Dave Britten]

As far as software, the WP-34S is excellent, but it's an unfortunate victim of the poor keyboard quality of the 20b and 30b. I wouldn't recommend it as a daily driver, unless you want to run the emulator on a 7" tablet or something.

I keep a 48SX on my desk, as I much prefer the keyboard and menu layouts to the 50g (and even the 48GX to a small extent). The 50g has a lot of great additional functionality, but I always felt like it made a lot of steps backwards in terms of usability.

I am neurotically awaiting delivery of a DM-16L and DM-41L, and will more than likely be ordering a 42L (or whatever it ends up being called) this summer. Pounding out a quick keystroke-style program on a traditional RPN calculator is often a much faster process than doing an equivalent structured RPL version (thanks in no small part to the sluggish text editor), and if I need to do some kind of sophisticated structured/OO coding, it's probably better off done in C# or Python anyway. (As an aside, I once pounded out a triangular peg solitaire solver in Pythonista entirely on my iPhone at a family dinner party. Yeah, I'm that relative.)