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I think Excel is a bit of both. It is pretty amazing what people do with Excel. It's probably one of the most effective software tools ever created. It straddl

I think Excel is a bit of both. It is pretty amazing what people do with Excel. It's probably one of the most effective software tools ever created. It straddles this incredible balance between completely free-form input and structured data enabling very powerful functionality.

cup-of-tea 9y ago
But there could be errors hiding anywhere. All you know is it looks correct.
- dwaltrip 9y ago
  Sure, but the cost to fix that issue, and the flexibility you have to give up to do so, is apparently not worth it most of the time, if we look at how people use the software. Perhaps there is a systematic undervaluing of more polished, robust custom solutions by excel users across the world. That could be the case. But there is also probably an under-supply of adequate custom solutions. I have seen comments over the years on HN from people who have had much success in consultanting gigs where they simply built custom tools to replace ad-hoc workflows and processes living in places like Excel.
  - cup-of-tea 9y ago
    > Sure, but the cost to fix that issue, and the flexibility you have to give up to do so, is apparently not worth it most of the time, if we look at how people use the software. That's not true. People just don't know any better. Look around you and you'll see many people using the wrong tools. It doesn't mean they've made a rational decision to use those, it usually means they're not aware of a better alternative.
  - lmm 9y ago
    All existing business processes tolerate high error rates. They have to, because anything that people do by hand will necessarily have a high error rate. So when programmers come to automate an existing business process, they often vastly overestimate the value of correctness at least in the short term: if the program does the wrong thing even 1% of the time, it's really not a problem, because the processes around this process will be built to tolerate that. In the long term, correctness may become more valuable. An analogy: when factories first switched to electric power, they simply connected electric motors to the existing driveshafts used to distribute steam power around the factory, and only realised small improvements in productivity that way. But once factories were more fully converted to electric power, it became possible to rearrange machines to suit workflows (rather than being arranged around the driveshafts) and this lead to much bigger productivity gains.
- coldtea 9y ago
  You don't get any better assurances on the cli.
  - cup-of-tea 9y ago
    What do you mean by "the cli"? Garbage in/garbage out always applies, that's not what I'm talking about. The point is errors in the code doing the processing. If it's written in a language you can read and understand the entire thing. You cannot read and understand an entire spreadsheet.
    - coldtea 9y ago
      >You cannot read and understand an entire spreadsheet. Why wouldn't you? Except if you mean the internal implementation (by MS). But nobody reads the implementation of Pandas or R either...
      - adrianN 9y ago
        A spreadsheet doesn't offer you a linear story that you can read. It's a strange amalgamation of computation and program.
      - cup-of-tea 9y ago
        I'm not talking about reading the underlying implementation, although that is, of course, another advantage of Python and R. I'm talking about reading the project. What's your process for reading a spreadsheet? Reading every single cell?
        telchar 9y ago
        That's a good point. In a block of 10,000 cells that should all have the same formula (offset by 1, say) how do you know that they all actually have that same formula? I'm not aware of a way to check that that doesn't involve writing custom VBA.
scroot 9y ago
There is a reason VisiCalc was such a big deal when it first came out. This is a UI that is both intuitive to regular people and also incredibly powerful -- and one that takes little effort to learn. It's a sign of the kinds of things that are possible with computing (reducing the gap between what today we call "coders" and "users"). There are few really large efforts towards research in this area these days and we are poorer for it. Here is a good paper from Alan Kay that relates: https://frameworker.files.wordpress.com/2008/05/alan-kay-computer-software-sciam-sept-84.pdf https://frameworker.files.wordpress.com/2008/05/alan-kay-com...

cup-of-tea 9y ago

But there could be errors hiding anywhere. All you know is it looks correct.

dwaltrip 9y ago
Sure, but the cost to fix that issue, and the flexibility you have to give up to do so, is apparently not worth it most of the time, if we look at how people use the software. Perhaps there is a systematic undervaluing of more polished, robust custom solutions by excel users across the world. That could be the case. But there is also probably an under-supply of adequate custom solutions. I have seen comments over the years on HN from people who have had much success in consultanting gigs where they simply built custom tools to replace ad-hoc workflows and processes living in places like Excel.
- cup-of-tea 9y ago
  > Sure, but the cost to fix that issue, and the flexibility you have to give up to do so, is apparently not worth it most of the time, if we look at how people use the software. That's not true. People just don't know any better. Look around you and you'll see many people using the wrong tools. It doesn't mean they've made a rational decision to use those, it usually means they're not aware of a better alternative.
- lmm 9y ago
  All existing business processes tolerate high error rates. They have to, because anything that people do by hand will necessarily have a high error rate. So when programmers come to automate an existing business process, they often vastly overestimate the value of correctness at least in the short term: if the program does the wrong thing even 1% of the time, it's really not a problem, because the processes around this process will be built to tolerate that. In the long term, correctness may become more valuable. An analogy: when factories first switched to electric power, they simply connected electric motors to the existing driveshafts used to distribute steam power around the factory, and only realised small improvements in productivity that way. But once factories were more fully converted to electric power, it became possible to rearrange machines to suit workflows (rather than being arranged around the driveshafts) and this lead to much bigger productivity gains.
coldtea 9y ago
You don't get any better assurances on the cli.
- cup-of-tea 9y ago
  What do you mean by "the cli"? Garbage in/garbage out always applies, that's not what I'm talking about. The point is errors in the code doing the processing. If it's written in a language you can read and understand the entire thing. You cannot read and understand an entire spreadsheet.
  - coldtea 9y ago
    >You cannot read and understand an entire spreadsheet. Why wouldn't you? Except if you mean the internal implementation (by MS). But nobody reads the implementation of Pandas or R either...
    - adrianN 9y ago
      A spreadsheet doesn't offer you a linear story that you can read. It's a strange amalgamation of computation and program.
    - cup-of-tea 9y ago
      I'm not talking about reading the underlying implementation, although that is, of course, another advantage of Python and R. I'm talking about reading the project. What's your process for reading a spreadsheet? Reading every single cell?
      - telchar 9y ago
        That's a good point. In a block of 10,000 cells that should all have the same formula (offset by 1, say) how do you know that they all actually have that same formula? I'm not aware of a way to check that that doesn't involve writing custom VBA.

scroot 9y ago

There is a reason VisiCalc was such a big deal when it first came out. This is a UI that is both intuitive to regular people and also incredibly powerful -- and one that takes little effort to learn. It's a sign of the kinds of things that are possible with computing (reducing the gap between what today we call "coders" and "users"). There are few really large efforts towards research in this area these days and we are poorer for it. Here is a good paper from Alan Kay that relates: https://frameworker.files.wordpress.com/2008/05/alan-kay-computer-software-sciam-sept-84.pdf https://frameworker.files.wordpress.com/2008/05/alan-kay-com...