"...all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed..."
First, I'll point out that I agree with most of your points. However, I want to point out that it is the policy of the ESRB that you have to disclose all possibly offensive content on the disk, regardless of whether it appears in the game or not. For the reasons you mentioned, I don't particularly agree with this policy, but it is the ESRB's policy and it has been since long before the Hot Coffee scandal.
Damn, I did the same thing, but you beat me to posting it. Honestly, the Python solution isn't any more difficult for J. Random User to learn than the BASIC solution is, and even if from math import sqrt is too over their head it's still possible to do x ** 0.5. I don't know why the grandparent bitches about "figuring out how to save a file and run it" and then listing a command-line interpreted language as an example...
Besides, the "usefulness" of the quadratic formula program generally doesn't extend far past people taking high school/college algebra and people who actually use complex math in their computer use. Anyone doing work requiring them to use complex math is probably smart enough to learn Python. Python is a much more powerful language than BASIC for doing complex math, and the amount of the language you have to learn to do that isn't all that difficult. I use Python as a desktop calculator all the time, even when I'm programming in other languages I'll bust out Python in another terminal to double-check my algorithms.
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"...all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed..."
--Declaration of Independence
First, I'll point out that I agree with most of your points. However, I want to point out that it is the policy of the ESRB that you have to disclose all possibly offensive content on the disk, regardless of whether it appears in the game or not. For the reasons you mentioned, I don't particularly agree with this policy, but it is the ESRB's policy and it has been since long before the Hot Coffee scandal.
Damn, I did the same thing, but you beat me to posting it. Honestly, the Python solution isn't any more difficult for J. Random User to learn than the BASIC solution is, and even if from math import sqrt is too over their head it's still possible to do x ** 0.5. I don't know why the grandparent bitches about "figuring out how to save a file and run it" and then listing a command-line interpreted language as an example... Besides, the "usefulness" of the quadratic formula program generally doesn't extend far past people taking high school/college algebra and people who actually use complex math in their computer use. Anyone doing work requiring them to use complex math is probably smart enough to learn Python. Python is a much more powerful language than BASIC for doing complex math, and the amount of the language you have to learn to do that isn't all that difficult. I use Python as a desktop calculator all the time, even when I'm programming in other languages I'll bust out Python in another terminal to double-check my algorithms.