It's a mistake to ignore the customer [LWN.net]

It's a mistake to ignore the customer

Posted Dec 6, 2012 16:28 UTC (Thu) by david.a.wheeler (subscriber, #72896)
In reply to: It's a mistake to ignore the customer by jezuch
Parent article: GNU Guile 2.0.7 released

The only advantage of (infix) I can think of is familiarity

Yes, the only advantage of infix is that nearly all educated people spend 10 to 18 years in school using infix for all arithmetic work. People who do more math-related things (e.g., programming) tend to have even more experience using infix notations than the average person. Practically all math texts (where you might get useful algorithms) use infix, too. If people spent 10 to 18 years in school exclusively using prefix or postfix instead of infix, and nearly all books used prefix or postfix, they would prefer prefix or postfix instead. But this is not reality.

Are you going to change all schools and math books, worldwide, to use infix? No?

Infix is not going away. And most humans do prefer the familiar.

A programming language is not just for the computer, it's also for the humans. Humans can learn to use prefix, but most humans prefer to use a notation similar to what they've used for 10 or more years. The Fortran developers figured out how to do infix years ago, it's time for Lisp implementations to catch up to the first version of Fortran :-).

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It's a mistake to ignore the customer

Posted Dec 6, 2012 21:50 UTC (Thu) by dakas (guest, #88146) [Link]

Yes, the only advantage of infix is that nearly all educated people spend 10 to 18 years in school using infix for all arithmetic work. People who do more math-related things (e.g., programming) tend to have even more experience using infix notations than the average person. Practically all math texts (where you might get useful algorithms) use infix, too. If people spent 10 to 18 years in school exclusively using prefix or postfix instead of infix, and nearly all books used prefix or postfix, they would prefer prefix or postfix instead. But this is not reality.

The reality is that the most popular calculators for engineers have been HP for decades, postfix. According to your rationale, that should have been impossible. Have HP ignored their customers?

It's a mistake to ignore the customer

Posted Dec 7, 2012 5:43 UTC (Fri) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

You clearly haven't seen calculator sales this decade or last. TI and Casio have absolutely crushed HP. Both are infix. Coincidence? (maybe, who knows...?)

Don't get me wrong, my HP 48 and RPN rocketed me through 4 years of EE. But most of the other pre-Es in my classes used TI-8x and Casio FX-xxx, I assume partly because they didn't require a tutorial to do the simplest things.

So, be careful rolling out the "most popular among X" argument. Not surprisingly, that almost always supports the infix crowd.

HP calculators

Posted Dec 7, 2012 15:05 UTC (Fri) by david.a.wheeler (subscriber, #72896) [Link]

I have an HP calculator that uses RPN. I love it.

However, almost no one else I know of can even USE it, nor are they interested in learning how. If I offered the calculator to them, they'd say no thank you, and get a calculator that supports infix instead. Most people will immediately reject something that doesn't support infix today.

It's time to support modern expectations.