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Programmers drastically underestimate the amount of poor abstractions we've created. There's no reason someone should have to learn object oriented programming
by ethbro 7y ago
Programmers drastically underestimate the amount of poor abstractions we've created.
There's no reason someone should have to learn object oriented programming in order to be able to do 4 actions across 2 apps.
Fundamentally, that's what this article was getting at for me.
Should we (a) encourage more people to learn to code (in existing languages / frameworks), so that they might use coding to automate their own work, or (b) identify simplified systems that require less knowledge, but are sufficient for the automation tasks being asked of them.
I love learning about multi-level cache heirarchies and performance effects thereof.
But I would rather my company's accountants instead know the accounting-equivalent of that bit of trivia, and yet gain the benefit of being able to write simple automation on their computers.
- solinent 7y agoTo put what you've said more succinctly, even though reductionism is valid for a computer, there is no reason for us to reduce everyone to transistors. My mother is an accountant for example, and she could easily pick up SQL or a programming language, but the issue with teaching her one is that it doesn't solve any of her immediate problems. Excel already automates most of that work away, so for her that's all she needs. Your company's accountants can probably write excel statements that are equivalent to complex SQL statements, so I wouldn't underestimate them :)
- dsjimi 7y agoExcel is the world's most popular IDE ;)
- ethbro 7y agoOne of my weed out questions in programming interviews is to ask their opinion on Excel. Specifically, strengths and weaknesses. If they don't come up with at least one strength or spend the whole answer bashing it, that's an instant reject for any position touching UX.
- perl4ever 7y agoI could bash it in ways you probably haven't heard before... The clashing paradigms of the Data Model and "vanilla" Excel have really been aggravating me recently. I feel like Excel is underutilized for cultural reasons and it seems like it can do anything I was previously asked to use Qlikview for. But the fundamental reason I am using Excel these days is because I don't want to be subjected to a programming interview, ever again. I got my current job without any particular technical requirements, and the interview was entirely about how I manage my time and multitask.
- wiseleo 7y agoIf only she knew she could interact with Excel using SQL. I have shown that to some accountants and saw lightbulbs appear over their heads. :)
- perl4ever 7y agoAre you talking about querying databases from Excel, or querying tables in your spreadsheet as if it was a database?
- entelechy0 7y ago"There's no reason someone should have to learn object oriented programming in order to be able to do 4 actions across 2 apps." Object-oriented programming is extremely simple and is taught in high school and earlier.