Calculators are similar to a Dark Souls game. You always restart from the beginning.

Why didn't they just make one Clear and make another Backspace? The concept of erasing the last character had been in typewriters for a while by then, and this is far more obvious. Maybe erasing a single digit in earlier software/hardware was much harder than just clearing it all?

Oh my God. Me too!

edging the calcy

In defence of QWERTY, it did a decent job for what it was designed for (reducing the risk of mechanical typewriters jamming by not having two hammers next to each other be pressed at the same time), but really oughtn't have lasted past the point where the risk of jamming was not longer there.

Its to make sure that they don't get a billion questions about what button to push next and not being able to complete homework because of button confusion. Does it still need to exist today? Probably no but good luck getting rid of a standard adopted by all manufacturers of textbooks.

If there is any nuance beyond a 4-function calculator with a single clear button, any nuance or deviation from any kind of standard will not be clearly explained.

There's never a backspace key, only two "clear" buttons that have nuance between them and little to no description as to which does what.

For one thing, just displaying the latest number isn't useful if you're doing anything complicated. For another, many calculations involve using the same number over again multiple times. Some calculators have a memory entry, but many don't. There's a "C/CE" but there isn't a backspace, so if you get one digit wrong, you have to start that entry over (and hope you chose the right option among C/CE/AC/CA/etc. If you accidentally hit the wrong operation key (multiply, divide, plus, minus) AFAIK there's no way to clear the operation. A lot of common math operations involves parenthesized expressions, but if you're using a basic calculator you have to instead enter things in an unnatural order. It's pretty common to end up in a situation where the calculator is displaying B and you want to do A/B but you can only easily do B/A. Fancy calculators have a 1/X button to fix this, but if not you're out of luck. Same with having B and wanting to do A-B but only being able to do B-A. You can fix that by multiplying by -1, but again, it's a UI issue that you can't just say "hold onto that number for a second because I want to enter another number and then use it".

There sure is a lot of overlap with people criticizing the technical interface of a calculator and nerds, wonder why that is? Oh well glad I’m not one of those nerds, now back to the clear button being so obtuse.

Once I was working on some music and got so excited about how it turned out I hit ctrl S like 5 times, it corrupted the project and I lost it 😭

The "nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure" approach.

Not if ur university has dumb rules about what calculator u can us in exams.

RPN gang!