Today I wished to calculate a little nearer a value I reckoned at around 1500. I brought up the Start menu on my PC, opened Windows Accessory, and found not Calculator but "Math Input Panel". I had seen this under an earlier version of Windows, had made nothing of it, and hoped that it had been discarded by the time Windows 10 shipped. It had not.
I clicked in the window, started to type, and saw nothing in the panel. The keystrokes were going to the window previously visited, which was not what I wanted, of course. I therefore tried to draw the first term of the calculation with the mouse. That turned out worse than I'd have imagined.
I did once manage to trace a "4" that the panel accepted as a 4. Most times it read my 4 as the Greek letter phi. Out of curiosity, I kept on going, to draw 47000 as best I could. The panel interpreted it as phi to the delta E something-something. (E backwards, the symbol logicians use for "there exists").
The program strikes me as a tour de force, a case of programmers seeing what ingenious notions they can implement without considering what the users will make of it. I find it odder in that I never supposed programmers as a class to have good fine motor skills in general or good handwriting in particular. I generalize from my own experience, but am I wrong?
As it happened, I was also working on a Linux system, so I used its calculator. That accepted keyboard input, did not interpret "4" as phi, and gave me the answer I was looking for. One never really expects Linux to have friendlier tools than Windows, but in this case it did.
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