I was just updating a fellow Wanderer about my adventures diving into the W-Lambert function, too boring for words to a lotta people.
I admitted to fighting old battles.
What used to be uphill was my “everyone deserves a nerd cave” standard, as a responsibility of the education system.
“What system?” you may ask.
“Exactly” say I.
However, not having the means to get there doesn’t mean disagreeing on the ends. One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is old news by this time, yet was a previous obsession of these blogs. Not that every kid has easy access to a laptop by now. We just know that’s a goal.
I’ll quote from my outbox for the rest of this blog post:
"Using Python as a Calculator" I believe is the title of Guido's early tutorial (Guido being Python's inventor, Dutch guy) and it may still be embedded in the documentation somewhere. Yeah, it's still there.
But he never really meant a graphing calculator, as Python is not indigenously about producing graphical output; that's the job of 3rd party packages for the most part (still a part of Greater Python, but not "core" Python exactly, which is what Guido was wanting to teach at that juncture).
But my emphasis is a little different: actually replacing the scientific calculator as the classroom device of choice, or should we even have a classroom, when a personal workspace is the better choice? Like a nerd cave.
[ Why "go to class"? Well, lectures in person still have a point I guess. But crowding a lot of desktop or even laptop computers into a rank and file arrangement... really? I know the corporate types like the bullpen architecture for supervisory reasons... I say everyone deserves a nerd cave minimum, with plenty of compute, as they say today. ]
So I do go 3rd party and dig into scipy, numpy, matplotlib... all that 3rd party stuff that makes Python popular because powerful. It's not so much the language out of the box that people dig, but the ecosystem that has grown up around it.
The details of this so-called W function, inverse of x * e**x, may be too boring to contemplate (true for most people), however if you scroll down about half way you'll see the graphical calculator-like output I'm talking about; really better than a calculator might do.
I don't really even know to what extent the scientific calculator maintains its grip on contemporary high schoolers. I'm in many ways the product of my past, still fighting yesterday's battles (but hey, I'm learning new stuff in the process, so I wouldn't say I've stagnated entirely, no way jose!).
