[worksonmymach]

Do I need to pay to see that? It is confusing.

Anyway yes calculator apps are a fantastic project:

1. Can be anything from just running a lisp repl and doing (+ 2 2) to a full blown calculation and programming environment like Jupyter!

2. Can explore parsers, ui, ux, interpreters, graphics (if adding charting features for example), stack data structure, floating point arithmetic (or alternative arithmetics like mathematica) and so on. Lots to explore!

3. It is not a money making idea really which is good. So you can focus on the tech and not get an "entrepenuerial seizure" aka "i got an idea it make meeellllliionnnss!"

[bruce511]

Yes I agree. When I was at uni the best assignments were the ones that could be done simply (should take around an hour) but which offered a path to something more elaborate. There would be weeks a group of us would go into overdrive each trying to outdo the others.

Not always a lot of fun for the markers (who I suspect quickly learned to just guess and move on.)

Of course, while a fantastic learning experience its a terrible work habit. We start to believe "more is better" where as any professional will tell you "less is more".

It's harder to remove cruft than it is to add it.

[bilalcg]

Yup, I believe a calculator can also be created as a state machine (which is a really nice CS topic to learn), and that's what I think, for example, Desmos, is built upon. There are loads and loads of concepts that we can learn in building a calculator.

People generally think that they should juggle between different projects and while that isn't false, it's important to realize that it's better to extend one single project than to start off a new one when learning new stuff. What do you say?