3 ms·

> I'd guess it would be up to business programs and accounting programs and all these other college majors to actually teach classes in python and R, rather tha

> I'd guess it would be up to business programs and accounting programs and all these other college majors to actually teach classes in python and R, rather than what they do now which is teach classes in excel. Imo the entrenchment in excel is rooted in ignorance to other (often simpler) options available with python or R, than in any actual critical proprietary features offered by excel. Every time a business user sits at a computer, are they going to spend 10 minutes getting it done, or 30 minutes trying to figure out how to get pip env configured so they can maybe eventually get it done? If by some miracle they are supernaturally gifted at programming and succeed after some weeks, they now have: - a nonstandard file format that will eventually break - no real time feedback of formatting or calculation as they input/manipulate data - no charting - no GUI - no "undo" button - no import wizards - no support (but I guess someone light years ahead of any dev talent I have ever seen wouldn't need it) And all of this for a single use case. Microsoft (and I am no fan) has the best tool for data manipulation that exists for most of humanity. Excepting the awful ribbon UI redesign, you could take any Excel 97 user, put them in front of the latest M365 version, and they could get the same work accomplished in the same amount of time. You cannot say the same thing about almost anything else in the tech industry. Excel is terrible in a lot of ways. But it's a mostly reliable tool, has worked approximately the same way for 25 years, so people are going to use it and teach it. There's no point in wasting someone's valuable time with the horrifying fragility of the python/R/whatever ecosystem.

qwrshr 5y ago
there are languages that have better support with dependencies though, e.g. Julia (every time I have to debug dependency issues in some other person's Python code/requirements.txt, I find myself wishing it had been written in Julia). I'm not disagreeing with the overall tenor of your post, but I do think there's a medium that's possible to strike here: maybe something like a simplified DSL in Julia, or something like https://www.visidata.org/ https://www.visidata.org/
CRConrad 5y ago
> Microsoft (and I am no fan) has the best tool for data manipulation that exists for most of humanity. Sigh... "Microsoft has". Time was, spreadsheets was a generic category of software, made by lots of different software makers. Nowadays, it feels like people not only don't know this, but can hardly even conceive of the possibility that "spreadsheet" could mean something other than "Excel". At least I think that more people are still able to think of, say, word processors or presentation software as not necessarily Microsoft products; the spreadsheets battle seems to have been their most crushing victory in the "Office" or "productivity software" wars. It's sad not only for the IT world in general or from a free-market perspective, but for spreadsheets in specific, too: Who knows what stuff like Quattro Pro or Lotus Improv would be capable of now, if they were still around?
- pjmlp 5y ago
  True, however Microsoft is not to blame for the management errors of others, and there are other spreadsheets on the market still. Except instead of trying to be the C++ of Spredsheets, they target Go like capabilities, and then wonder why business keeps adopting Excel.

qwrshr 5y ago

there are languages that have better support with dependencies though, e.g. Julia (every time I have to debug dependency issues in some other person's Python code/requirements.txt, I find myself wishing it had been written in Julia). I'm not disagreeing with the overall tenor of your post, but I do think there's a medium that's possible to strike here: maybe something like a simplified DSL in Julia, or something like https://www.visidata.org/ https://www.visidata.org/

CRConrad 5y ago

> Microsoft (and I am no fan) has the best tool for data manipulation that exists for most of humanity. Sigh... "Microsoft has". Time was, spreadsheets was a generic category of software, made by lots of different software makers. Nowadays, it feels like people not only don't know this, but can hardly even conceive of the possibility that "spreadsheet" could mean something other than "Excel". At least I think that more people are still able to think of, say, word processors or presentation software as not necessarily Microsoft products; the spreadsheets battle seems to have been their most crushing victory in the "Office" or "productivity software" wars. It's sad not only for the IT world in general or from a free-market perspective, but for spreadsheets in specific, too: Who knows what stuff like Quattro Pro or Lotus Improv would be capable of now, if they were still around?

pjmlp 5y ago
True, however Microsoft is not to blame for the management errors of others, and there are other spreadsheets on the market still. Except instead of trying to be the C++ of Spredsheets, they target Go like capabilities, and then wonder why business keeps adopting Excel.