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As someone with a perhaps well deserved reputation as a Microsoft hater (ha, check my history..) Microsoft Excel is perhaps the greatest program-slash-programm
by jrm4 4y ago
As someone with a perhaps well deserved reputation as a Microsoft hater (ha, check my history..)
Microsoft Excel is perhaps the greatest program-slash-programming language ever invented. Nothing has much come close in terms of giving regular folks the power of general-purpose computing (sadly, further and further removed from what we're doing today.)
- RodgerTheGreat 4y agoHypercard. The difference, of course, is that Excel wasn't abandoned by its owners like Hypercard was.
- eddieroger 4y agoDammit I miss HyperCard. HyperCard got me in to programming by making it accessible to someone who didn't even realize they were doing it - my Hebrew teacher in third grade. There haven't been many tools that can make anything from a simple card file to Myst. I wish there was something like that today, or that I was a good enough engineer to contribute to a modern replacement.
- simonh 4y agoThere are quite a few options, including emulators, clones and HC inspired projects. https://hypercard.org/ https://hypercard.org/
- karencarits 4y agoIt's not a replacement per se, but tiddlywiki is the closest I have seen of a very flexible yet easy-to-use framework for people who have limited programming skills https://tiddlywiki.com/ https://tiddlywiki.com/ There is a long list of tools built in tiddlywiki: https://dynalist.io/d/zUP-nIWu2FFoXH-oM7L7d9DM https://dynalist.io/d/zUP-nIWu2FFoXH-oM7L7d9DM
- notaclevername 4y agoCheck out Power Apps. It is functionally Hypercard on top of any Office 365 data sources you want.
- RodgerTheGreat 4y agoI spent about half an hour poking around Microsoft's documentation for PowerApps and then their Youtube channel trying to find a concise demonstration of the tool, and it was all totally impenetrable. Everything was either too high-level- speaking aspirationally about the potential business value without really showing anything being made or used- or too low-level, off in the weeds tutorializing a very specific esoteric integration with a bunch of other tools, writing reams of backend code in some other language and environment. I feel confident in my evaluation that PowerApps is in a completely different universe of accessibility and complexity from Hypercard.
- agumonkey 4y agoThere are a few things reactive formulaic spreadsheets need to do before reaching peak. Normalization like concepts. Abstractions. It will come.
- kevin_thibedeau 4y agoIt already arrived in the form of Lotus Improv.
- agumonkey 4y agoimprov never caught up sadly.. but hey, it's reboot decade so time to dust it off in react
- jrm4 4y agoI'm unfortunately pessimistic. Not because they couldn't, but because in today's IT environment, "empowering the user" is perhaps the lowest priority.
- threatripper 4y agoIt does the job and it enables "regular folks" to solve business problems. This creates value. Most business problems don't require sophisticated IT systems. Sometimes I catch myself thinking about a sophisticated solution involving commercial software packages, databases, webservers, cloud services etc. and then I remember "If I bend the problem just a little bit it fits into an Excel table with a bit of VBA glue and the problem is solved in a much less complicated way. Our scale is small so it will stay solved for years to come. My coworkers can handle and maintain the file so it doesn't fall back to me when problems arise. So yeah, stupid as it may sound, Excel is the best solution for this problem."
- iasay 4y agoAvoiding any custom software development and purchasing is the number one priority for small to medium businesses that want to survive if you ask me. I've seen a couple of them killed by software. At this point I'd rather work for a company that is held together with Excel than "domain specific enterprise software" having worked in that sector for years. Actually the most fun I ever had was being the "IT guy" as a secondary function in a small engineering business in 2001. That was amazing. I didn't have to do a lot and could concentrate on my primary role with enough distractions to make it and my secondary one interesting. We just ran a Windows 2000 domain with 9 workstations on a switch with a 512K ADSL router and it basically just worked flawlessly. Excel 2000 featured heavily. I occasionally get the urge to build out a Windows 2000 and Office 2000 box just because it was the last windows release that I enjoyed.
- cosmodisk 4y agoI've seen enough cases where the opposite is the case. Businesses running off Excel spreadsheets are often very inefficient, drowning in more problems than solutions and the day to day workflows for employees are awful. I'm not trying to say a small shop should go all in with Oracle or SAP, however a healthy investment in specialised software often pays off extremely well.
- TAForObvReasons 4y ago
- iasay 4y agoI would agree. I'm an Apple Numbers user now but I have yet to find something even remotely as useful as the spreadsheet abstraction. I use them for everything from solving engineering problems, forecasting, statistics, decision analysis to personal finance and project planning. I could solve all of the problems with a programming language but it'd take 10x as long.
- marcodiego 4y ago> ever invented That would be visicalc then.
- heavyset_go 4y agoAgree with this entirely. Excel is the most successful and most productive "low code" platform out there.
- elefanten 4y agoI feel like I'm stuck in a timeloop. I swear I've read almost this exact comment as the top comment of a different (monthly) "Hacker News debates Excel" thread
- jrm4 4y agoHonestly, I think that speaks to the massively huge gap in this space. There's no technical reason we couldn't have a Hypercard-esque development platform that e.g. any professor of any discipline could use to make an app. (I'm in higher-ed, that's where my brain wen)
- Aaargh20318 4y ago> Microsoft Excel is perhaps the greatest program-slash-programming language ever invented I would argue the opposite: it is the single most harmful piece of software ever invented. It allows people to reduce everything to numbers and then expect reality to match with the numbers in the spreadsheet without any regard for the actual human beings it affects. It goes from “if we just change this number from 40 hrs/week to 50 hrs/week, we’ll make our deadline” all the way to “look, if we reduce the number or cancer treatments we authorize by X% then our profits go up by Y%”
- jhardy54 4y agoIs this a criticism of Excel specifically, or is the problem that it’s making basic arithmetic more accessible to institutions with negative externalities?
- Aaargh20318 4y agoIt’s a criticism of spreadsheets in general.
- jhardy54 4y agoDoes this criticism extend to graphing calculators?
- kenjackson 4y agoThis criticism extends to pretty much math in general.
- Aaargh20318 4y agoNo. Spreadsheets allow for easy manipulation of large tables of numbers and immediately see the results. It’s this ability to ‘tweak’ the numbers quickly that makes it so dangerous.
- lazide 4y ago
- mathattack 4y agoYes, now if I kind Microsoft could fix copy and paste from the desktop to online versions…
- vic-traill 4y agoObligatory BillyG Review story from Joel on Software: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-review/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev... It provides a glimpse into the complexity and backwards compatibility (to Lotus 1-2-3 no less!) that I find interesting.
- mathattack 4y agoYes, now if only Microsoft could fix copy and paste from the desktop to online versions…
- PeterStuer 4y agoI've seen Excel trive in no places more so than those commited to the "one true ERP" religeon. And it is not subversion. It is people trying to do their job despite draconian topdown unworcable policies and systems shoved down their thoat, keeping the operations side afloat in the face of debilitating managerial ignorance.
- hef19898 4y agoFrom experience, most Excel solutions are due to people refusing to use whatever solution their ERP system is offering. Often with disasterous results, results that nobody really sees because it is just the status quo. Nothing wrong to use Excel for reporting and number crunching, ERP systems are not designed to do that. I hate it when people take short cuts and corners because they refuse to accept that an ERP is there for a reason. I also hate it when the people setting uo an ERP ignore business needs. UX so is, rightly so, taking a back seat in all of these discusions.
- dragonwriter 4y ago> From experience, most Excel solutions are due to people refusing to use whatever solution their ERP system is offering. From experience, most Excel solutions are because people get rebuffed (or have learned by experience that they will expend lots of effort and the be rebuffed or given something not fit for purpose) by the bureaucratic processes necessary to get anything provided to them by their enterprise systems (ERP or otherwise) by the high priesthood that centrally administers those systems.
- hef19898 4y agoAs part of that priesthood, Excel is neither SOX nor otherwise compliant. If users get rebuffed, that is the overall system working as intended.
- dragonwriter 4y agoAs someone who has worked on both sides, if you don't want people making crappy excel-based, local-to-their-shop solutions, but they are because of the unresponsiveness and inutility of your central IT bureaucracy, the system is not, in fact, working as intended.
- dccoolgai 4y agoAs a developer, when I worked in VBA it was just way more rewarding and appreciated. I was way happier with the work I was doing and having a much bigger (and more visible) impact... Sadly I got paid roughly 1/4 of what I get paid now to muck around in package.json files all day. I know it's not fashionable to say,but yeah I feel like Excel is underrated and scoffed at by the "serious tech" community when it should be lauded as an example to strive towards.
- EddySchauHai 4y agoIt's actually pretty technically awesome too. When I was studying for an MSc in CS I focused on program synthesis and one of the key papers of applied program synthesis is Flashfill in Excel (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/popl11-synthesis.pdf https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...). It might seem boring but there's a lot of really cool stuff in the backend of it!
- croes 4y agoAnd that's exactly the problem. It's great if the person using it knows what he is doing. I don't want to know how many decisions are based on incorrect excel sheets or exel files no one understands anymore because the original developer already left the company and the next added some "improvement" without really understanding the existing code.
- schwartzworld 4y agoIs it really easier to learn excel in depth than a programming language?