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by Kye 456 days ago
Calculators are a good example of where letting too much knowledge slip can be an issue. So many are made by people with no grasp of order of operations or choosing data types. They could look it up, but they don't know they need to.

It's one of those problems that seems easy, but isn't. The issue seems to come out when we let an aid for process replace gaining the knowledge behind the process. You at least need to know what you don't know so you can develop an intuition for when outputs don't (or might not) make sense.

https://chadnauseam.com/coding/random/calculator-app

(recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43066953)

1 comments

Complaining about "order of operations" is equivalent to saying Spanish speakers are ignorant because they don't know French.

It's especially silly because one thing calculators are known for is being inconsistent about order of operations between designs.