Comment by dmurray

> But they never will be a viable alternative to decimals. Computation is too hard with them for one.

I think this is too narrow-minded.

You could make the same argument for ideograms vs alphabetic writing: one is clearly superior and you could never have a technological superpower that relies primarily on the other, but thanks to historical path dependency we actually have both.

I could imagine a world where the SI system never took off in engineering, due to stubborn people at inopportune moments. Engineers and physicists would still get their jobs done in imperial units, just like American carpenters do today.

Also I did elide the distinction between continued fractions and infinite sums of fractions, but again we can use our imagination and say that if continued fractions were commonplace, we'd all be a lot more familiar with the infinite sums too.