But does it blend?

yeah, they are trying everything to beat TI, but schools all use TI, TI had a headstart.  You know, If TI had more competition, their calcs would be a lot better.  besides, there really isn't much of a Casio or HP calc community.

I've noticed. That said, excluding these forums and TIcalc, there isn't much of a TI community to speak of either. But I have found some HP programs useful as the language is almost identical to TI-BASIC.


EDIT: Is there any way to work around the lack of BASIC user input for the Nspire in Assembly?

We can always write our own BASIC.

It would be nice if someone wrote something like TI-83+ BASIC for the Nspire and/or Axe, so Nspire dev have a wider audience than just C and ASM programmers. BBC Basic would be nice, too, as long as the editor is user-friendly.

Wait, the nSpire codes in C?

Yes. We've been able to program in C for about ten years on the TI-68k platform; three years after the introduction of the Nspire platform, it was high time that Ndless + the various ARM toolchains out there (e.g. YAGARTO) enabled programming in C on the Nspire platform

Definitely ASM-like, since C is compiled to assembly. Of course, humans can do better than the compiler, but at the cost of significantly increased development and debugging time (3x-5x).
On platforms powerful enough, due to the "80/20 rule" (i.e. the heuristic fact that in most programs, ~80% of the time is spent in ~20% of the code - sometimes it's 70% of the time in 30% of the code, sometimes it's 90% of the time in 10% of the code, but you get the idea), full ASM makes perfect sense for several CPU-intensive bits of the program, but less sense for others.
On the TI-68k platform, for example, graphical libraries are usually written in ASM, and most of their client programs are written in C.

Because programming in BASIC is easier than programming in C, and the Nspire's built-in BASIC sucks: four years after the introduction of the Nspire platform, the Nspire still doesn't have getKey() or pixel/line/etc drawing abilities.