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Comment by JadeNB | Hacker News Reader

> macOS is produced by the richest company on Earth and a few years ago the CALCULATOR app had a bug that made it give the wrong answers...

This is stated as if surprising, presumably because we think of a calculator app as a simple thing, but it probably shouldn't be that surprising--surely the calculator app isn't used that often, and so doesn't get much in-the-field testing. Maybe you've occasionally used the calculator in Spotlight, but have you ever opened the app? I don't think I have in 20 years.

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I think this is backwards. A calculator app should be a simple thing. There's nothing undefined or novel about a calculator app. You can buy a much more capable physical calculator from Texas Instruments for less than $100 and I'm pretty sure the CPU in one of those is just an ant with some pen and paper.

You and I only think it's complex because we've become accustomed to everything being complex when it comes to writing software. That's my point. The mathematical operations are not hard (even the "fancy" ones like the trig functions). Formatting a number to be displayed is also not hard (again, those $100 calculators do it just fine). So, why is it so hard to write the world's 100,000th calculator app that the world's highest paid developers can't get it 100% perfect? There's something super wrong with our situation that it's even possible to have a race condition between the graphical effects and the actual math code that causes the calculator to display the wrong results.

If we weren't forced to build a skyscraper with Lego bricks, we might stand a better chance.

> That's my point. The mathematical operations are not hard (even the "fancy" ones like the trig functions). Formatting a number to be displayed is also not hard (again, those $100 calculators do it just fine).

Right, and that's my point: if all you want is a rock-solid computational platform, then you can use, for example, `bc`. (That's what I do.) I assume that Apple assumes that their users want something fancier than that, and it's there, with the fanciness of a shiny user interface on a less-exercised code path, that the bugs will inevitably come.

'bc' was first released literally half a century ago. If that is still the state of the art, I think it is absolutely fair to sound the alarm that something is VERY wrong with our modern software development practices. We shouldn't have to choose between "modern GUI" and "works".

(For what it's worth, Qalculate destroys both bc and the Mac calculator app in both command line and GUI categories, so making working software isn't entirely a lost art.)

Constantly, to keep the results of a calculation on screen. It's fallacious to assume that your own usage patterns are common. Hell, with as much evidence as you (none), I would venture that more people use the Calculator app than know that you can type calculations in Spotlight at all.

> It's fallacious to assume that your own usage patterns are common. Hell, with as much evidence as you (none) ….

I don't assume that my usage pattern is common. (My usage pattern is to drop to `bc`.) I assume that Calculator usage isn't common, but, recognizing that that is an assumption and that the only way to get evidence is to ask, I asked:

> Maybe you've occasionally used the calculator in Spotlight, but have you ever opened the app?

And you answered, so now together we have double the evidence that I alone did before. :-)

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