There's right now on the HN front page a thread about people using Excel [0]. I'll quote from some comments in that thread: >Nobody is born knowing what tools

There's right now on the HN front page a thread about people using Excel [0]. I'll quote from some comments in that thread: >Nobody is born knowing what tools to use or how to use them, but Excel is one of the first pieces of software that deal with data for a lot of people, and as such one of the first things they turn to when faced with a new problem. >I’ve done some travel to Africa and am amazed at the ingenuity/batshit workflows that exist to get work done and live life. >I'm continually shocked at how technically incompetent academics can be. Otherwise brilliant people with the most batshit technical workflows I've ever seen. >People are very inventive to get their job done. These crazy uses for manipulating something that isn't really understood by its users (Excel) happened only in one generation. In only that short amount of time, many people came up with a lot of ideas the original designers didn't even dream of. Why do you say that over a timeline of thousands of years, people couldn't come up with some ideas that you would never think of? I have no idea why somebody would think that mixing non-food with ash would yield something edible, but I'm not surprised that somebody came up with the idea at some point. Other people always seem have a knack for coming up with stuff you never could've imagined. [0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30986329 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30986329