6 ms·

Eh, unfortunately the one programming breakthrough the world actually needs is one that would drastically change, and perhaps harm, most of the people around he

by jrm4 4y ago

Eh, unfortunately the one programming breakthrough the world actually needs is one that would drastically change, and perhaps harm, most of the people around here. We need more "Excels." More and better tools that let "regular" people program.

spikej 4y ago
Or more realistically the rapid application development tools need to be better so we're not bogged down dealing with latest fad or resume driven development
- vsareto 4y ago
  There's not much reason to improve things. No one's out here saying "you don't get this job because you chose new technologies when they weren't needed". Even if you can equate glue code with trash, we seem to have unlimited space or a black hole to throw that trash.
- jimbob45 4y ago
  What more do you want beyond Wix and VB.NET? People just don’t use RAD stuff anymore because…well I don’t know why.
PeterWhittaker 4y ago
Excel programming errors cost business $$$ https://www.cnbc.com/amp/id/100923538 https://www.cnbc.com/amp/id/100923538
- genghisjahn 4y ago
  You’re right. All business should get rid of spreadsheets to save money.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    We can't blame spreadsheets for the cited errors, because they're errors in arithmetic rather than Excel bugs. All businesses should get rid of arithmetic.
- swatcoder 4y ago
  Engineering salaries cost business $$$ too. And still introduce costly errors of their own.
- ta988 4y ago
  The question is not just how much Excel costs, it is how much revenue it helps bring in. And in many places, it brings more than it costs. Nothing is worse than a poorly designed webapp that was supposed to solve the "Excel problem" in a process.
- rileyphone 4y ago
  Many more such cases [0], but Excel and spreadsheets in general also save businesses $$$$$, which explains their pervasiveness. Calculations take a long time and are easier for a human to mess up, which is why the initial spreadsheets were so popular as to drive the adoption of the personal computer in general [1]. The gulf between Excel and Python is pretty obvious, but there recently there have been few with their sights set on it, as most programmers looking to improve programming do so from their own experienced vantage point. [0] http://www.eusprig.org/horror-stories.htm http://www.eusprig.org/horror-stories.htm [1] https://www.wired.com/2014/10/a-spreadsheet-way-of-knowledge/ https://www.wired.com/2014/10/a-spreadsheet-way-of-knowledge...
SKILNER 4y ago
Regular people have their regular jobs to do. They want to use tools, not build them. I'm all into PowerApps and all that, but no-code for anything the least bit sizable or complex is a fantasy from citizen developers.
- conradev 4y ago
  It is not a fantasy for small businesses, who rely on internal tools and processes to operate. These tools solve real pain points for them and that is why they exist and why it is a fast growing market.
  - halfmatthalfcat 4y ago
    It's a lot of hype right now, not necessarily indicative of staying power. We've been through multiple bouts of "no-code/low-code will replace X" and it has never materialized in any meaningful way.
    - conradev 4y ago
      Zapier has been around for a decade at this point and has shown continuous, revenue-driven growth
wokwokwok 4y ago
I'm not going to argue whether the 'world actually needs' that, or if people mostly, actually want that, or if, since excel is already there if you want it, you probably don't have to write, sell or build any more low code tools. ...because, although I could argue about those points, it's fundamentally unrelated to the OP, and issue that programming is hard, and, for a very long time, no one has really had any idea how to solve it. Now, however, AI generated code (like copilot) is, for the first time in a long time, a potential avenue to actually change how software is created at all levels. I think there's pretty interesting, because it opens up a lot of new opportunities. Is the future dynamic languages / high level specifications that are AI-transformed into typed verbose languages like C/Rust/whatever and then compiled? The ancient tools like Rational Rose tried to do this, but the tech was never actually technically good enough. Maybe... we'll see a real change in this space as the sophistication of the models improves... or maybe, like self-driving cars, it's always going to be 'nearly good enough'. Hard to say. ...but, hot damn. More excels? Please no. Excel already exists. Don't rebuild that stuff again. Build new, different interesting tools please.
- ziddoap 4y ago
  >...but, hot damn. More excels? Please no. Excel already exists. Don't rebuild that stuff again. I don't think they literally meant another Excel. Just something that is easily accessible and usable by non-programmers to do very 'programmy' things, etc.
  - sleepybrett 4y ago
    This argument also just assumes, 'anyone can sit down and use excel'. Which is not true, excel has a learning curve like anything else, most people learn 'just enough' to do their job, maybe there is a guy in their office that knows a little bit more and they can learn from them. But excel proficiency acquisition is very similar to a programming proficiency acquisition, maybe the track runs out faster (at some point you reach real diminishing returns and limits to a spreadsheet's capabilities but I've seen some insane shit written in excel, raytracers for instance, but no-one who has done that thinks it's a good idea.)
whartung 4y ago
I'm a firm believer in empowering end user automation. The atrocities that folks cobble together with the Excels of the world are a marvel, and more power to them. But in the end, we all talk about leaky abstractions, and the stark horror is that the fact that all of these wonders run on a computer, the worlds leakiest abstraction, the worlds most stubborn, pig headed, cantankerous contraption out there. And all the lipstick in the world can't hide it.
- enos_feedler 4y ago
  I think it goes beyond automation and into customization. Giving end users the power to "program the program" just makes it possible to make the thing do what they want in a way that it wasn't set out to do. Without having to pay/find/wait for a developer to do it. Sometimes it's about automation. Sometimes it isn't.
immigrantheart 4y ago
Why would it harm us? We are problem solvers, we can use our intellect somewhere else. Programming is just a tool. A lot of my colleagues are hybrid of traders + programmers. They do a lot of Excel. Sure, we can automate text programming, let everyone do Excel, and us problem solvers still won’t find difficulties finding high paying job.
- jrm4 4y ago
  I wish every programmer held this sentiment and I'm guessing most don't
mamcx 4y ago
This is a good take, but easy to misunderstand. The main problem is that MOST "programming" languages/environments are not made for business apps, (or for other niches, btw). Python? Ruby? Julia? Delphi? all fail to work to make(or solve even small cases of) business apps. By a long mile. ----- What Excel solves, is have a barebones, half-working, unscalable, ill-suited... BUT MADE FOR help people get a "solution" for this. Things that are more like this are Django, Jupyter notebooks, a little of Julia, FoxPro. But still are more pro-developer than pro-power-user.
- urthor 4y ago
  Power Automate or whatever it's called exist. I'd say the great weakness of No Code solutions isn't so much they are bad, but that they have no FOSS support. At all.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
dehrmann 4y ago
I was agreeing with you, but as I thought about it, I remembered MS Access. It is used, often ships with Office, but still isn't close to as popular as Excel. Either the model is wrong, or the need isn't there.
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  Access used to be pretty standard for a small business trying to improve their situation, but we in the software development world spent so much time trying to work around limitations of Access and upgrading growing businesses out of Access that we took it personally and shouted to everyone not to use Access. However, it is still taught in IT classes as a useful tool for small businesses, and it is.
  - codereviewed 4y ago
    My very first paid web gig was connecting a small business' Access based product catalog to their website. I was 14 or 15 at the time. I was able to do it with out any real coding knowledge except for some basic HTML I learned from MySpace and some copy-paste VBScript, haha. The site was a hit and I made $1,200 and immediately spent it all on an electric guitar.
- staindk 4y ago
  MS Access has awful UX. I've used it on and off over the years and can never find my 'flow state' as nothing in that program seems to flow at all. If MS prioritised working on it it may have helped lift some people out of Excel and into DBA-lite territory but not in its current state.
- ElectricalUnion 4y ago
  In my experience, the main problem is that while Excel "distributed code versioning" with a whole bunch of copies around is awful, Access databases are not only much more prone to corruption and data loss in general (even in single user, non-simultaneous ideal use cases, never mind people attempting to multiplayer edit it over network shares...), it's often very hard for non-programmers to get any insights on any data you threw on it without using Excel in the first place. So if the data is coming from Excel, and being extracted back to Excel, why use anything besides Excel?
surement 4y ago
You can already have "regular" people as software engineers if you follow basic concepts like the SOLID principles. Unfortunately many engineers are incredibly smart and they don't see the difference between writing spaghetti code with cryptic names and writing clear, legible code that normal people can follow. I've worked with people that could figure out a program written in binary if they needed to, but that meant that they never learned to write structured, sensible, readable programs.
thrown_22 4y ago
>We need more "Excels." More and better tools that let "regular" people program. The only reason why more people don't program is because Windows is antithetical to programming _anything_. The second you remove people from a windows environment is the moment they start coding, even by accident.
dkottow 4y ago
True, but just using Excel does not lead to decent data models, though. IMHO, what we would need is for "regular" folks to grasp the basics of relational database first (at least 1:n and n:1) and then build an easy to use excel-like tool around it.
solomatov 4y ago
>More and better tools that let "regular" people program. There's one catch with Excel, the more complicated your spreadsheet gets, the closer it gets to programming. And at some point, it's more cost effective to write in a proper programming language than continue to maintain mess. However, until this complexity level, Excel is great, and empowers a lot of people who barely know the basic features of Excel to solve their computational problems.
ParetoOptimal 4y ago
Simon Peyton Jones put some work towards that: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/podcast/advancing-excel-as-a-programming-language-with-andy-gordon-and-simon-peyton-jones/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/podcast/advancing-e... User defined functions: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/lambda-the-ultimatae-excel-worksheet-function/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/lambda-the-ult...

by jrm4 4y ago

spikej 4y ago

Or more realistically the rapid application development tools need to be better so we're not bogged down dealing with latest fad or resume driven development

vsareto 4y ago
There's not much reason to improve things. No one's out here saying "you don't get this job because you chose new technologies when they weren't needed". Even if you can equate glue code with trash, we seem to have unlimited space or a black hole to throw that trash.
jimbob45 4y ago
What more do you want beyond Wix and VB.NET? People just don’t use RAD stuff anymore because…well I don’t know why.

PeterWhittaker 4y ago

Excel programming errors cost business $$$ https://www.cnbc.com/amp/id/100923538 https://www.cnbc.com/amp/id/100923538

genghisjahn 4y ago
You’re right. All business should get rid of spreadsheets to save money.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  We can't blame spreadsheets for the cited errors, because they're errors in arithmetic rather than Excel bugs. All businesses should get rid of arithmetic.
swatcoder 4y ago
Engineering salaries cost business $$$ too. And still introduce costly errors of their own.
ta988 4y ago
The question is not just how much Excel costs, it is how much revenue it helps bring in. And in many places, it brings more than it costs. Nothing is worse than a poorly designed webapp that was supposed to solve the "Excel problem" in a process.
rileyphone 4y ago
Many more such cases [0], but Excel and spreadsheets in general also save businesses $$$$$, which explains their pervasiveness. Calculations take a long time and are easier for a human to mess up, which is why the initial spreadsheets were so popular as to drive the adoption of the personal computer in general [1]. The gulf between Excel and Python is pretty obvious, but there recently there have been few with their sights set on it, as most programmers looking to improve programming do so from their own experienced vantage point. [0] http://www.eusprig.org/horror-stories.htm http://www.eusprig.org/horror-stories.htm [1] https://www.wired.com/2014/10/a-spreadsheet-way-of-knowledge/ https://www.wired.com/2014/10/a-spreadsheet-way-of-knowledge...

SKILNER 4y ago

Regular people have their regular jobs to do. They want to use tools, not build them. I'm all into PowerApps and all that, but no-code for anything the least bit sizable or complex is a fantasy from citizen developers.

conradev 4y ago
It is not a fantasy for small businesses, who rely on internal tools and processes to operate. These tools solve real pain points for them and that is why they exist and why it is a fast growing market.
- halfmatthalfcat 4y ago
  It's a lot of hype right now, not necessarily indicative of staying power. We've been through multiple bouts of "no-code/low-code will replace X" and it has never materialized in any meaningful way.
  - conradev 4y ago
    Zapier has been around for a decade at this point and has shown continuous, revenue-driven growth

wokwokwok 4y ago

I'm not going to argue whether the 'world actually needs' that, or if people mostly, actually want that, or if, since excel is already there if you want it, you probably don't have to write, sell or build any more low code tools. ...because, although I could argue about those points, it's fundamentally unrelated to the OP, and issue that programming is hard, and, for a very long time, no one has really had any idea how to solve it. Now, however, AI generated code (like copilot) is, for the first time in a long time, a potential avenue to actually change how software is created at all levels. I think there's pretty interesting, because it opens up a lot of new opportunities. Is the future dynamic languages / high level specifications that are AI-transformed into typed verbose languages like C/Rust/whatever and then compiled? The ancient tools like Rational Rose tried to do this, but the tech was never actually technically good enough. Maybe... we'll see a real change in this space as the sophistication of the models improves... or maybe, like self-driving cars, it's always going to be 'nearly good enough'. Hard to say. ...but, hot damn. More excels? Please no. Excel already exists. Don't rebuild that stuff again. Build new, different interesting tools please.

ziddoap 4y ago
>...but, hot damn. More excels? Please no. Excel already exists. Don't rebuild that stuff again. I don't think they literally meant another Excel. Just something that is easily accessible and usable by non-programmers to do very 'programmy' things, etc.
- sleepybrett 4y ago
  This argument also just assumes, 'anyone can sit down and use excel'. Which is not true, excel has a learning curve like anything else, most people learn 'just enough' to do their job, maybe there is a guy in their office that knows a little bit more and they can learn from them. But excel proficiency acquisition is very similar to a programming proficiency acquisition, maybe the track runs out faster (at some point you reach real diminishing returns and limits to a spreadsheet's capabilities but I've seen some insane shit written in excel, raytracers for instance, but no-one who has done that thinks it's a good idea.)

whartung 4y ago

I'm a firm believer in empowering end user automation. The atrocities that folks cobble together with the Excels of the world are a marvel, and more power to them. But in the end, we all talk about leaky abstractions, and the stark horror is that the fact that all of these wonders run on a computer, the worlds leakiest abstraction, the worlds most stubborn, pig headed, cantankerous contraption out there. And all the lipstick in the world can't hide it.

enos_feedler 4y ago
I think it goes beyond automation and into customization. Giving end users the power to "program the program" just makes it possible to make the thing do what they want in a way that it wasn't set out to do. Without having to pay/find/wait for a developer to do it. Sometimes it's about automation. Sometimes it isn't.

immigrantheart 4y ago

Why would it harm us? We are problem solvers, we can use our intellect somewhere else. Programming is just a tool. A lot of my colleagues are hybrid of traders + programmers. They do a lot of Excel. Sure, we can automate text programming, let everyone do Excel, and us problem solvers still won’t find difficulties finding high paying job.

jrm4 4y ago
I wish every programmer held this sentiment and I'm guessing most don't

mamcx 4y ago

This is a good take, but easy to misunderstand. The main problem is that MOST "programming" languages/environments are not made for business apps, (or for other niches, btw). Python? Ruby? Julia? Delphi? all fail to work to make(or solve even small cases of) business apps. By a long mile. ----- What Excel solves, is have a barebones, half-working, unscalable, ill-suited... BUT MADE FOR help people get a "solution" for this. Things that are more like this are Django, Jupyter notebooks, a little of Julia, FoxPro. But still are more pro-developer than pro-power-user.

urthor 4y ago
Power Automate or whatever it's called exist. I'd say the great weakness of No Code solutions isn't so much they are bad, but that they have no FOSS support. At all.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

dehrmann 4y ago

I was agreeing with you, but as I thought about it, I remembered MS Access. It is used, often ships with Office, but still isn't close to as popular as Excel. Either the model is wrong, or the need isn't there.

mrguyorama 4y ago
Access used to be pretty standard for a small business trying to improve their situation, but we in the software development world spent so much time trying to work around limitations of Access and upgrading growing businesses out of Access that we took it personally and shouted to everyone not to use Access. However, it is still taught in IT classes as a useful tool for small businesses, and it is.
- codereviewed 4y ago
  My very first paid web gig was connecting a small business' Access based product catalog to their website. I was 14 or 15 at the time. I was able to do it with out any real coding knowledge except for some basic HTML I learned from MySpace and some copy-paste VBScript, haha. The site was a hit and I made $1,200 and immediately spent it all on an electric guitar.
staindk 4y ago
MS Access has awful UX. I've used it on and off over the years and can never find my 'flow state' as nothing in that program seems to flow at all. If MS prioritised working on it it may have helped lift some people out of Excel and into DBA-lite territory but not in its current state.
ElectricalUnion 4y ago
In my experience, the main problem is that while Excel "distributed code versioning" with a whole bunch of copies around is awful, Access databases are not only much more prone to corruption and data loss in general (even in single user, non-simultaneous ideal use cases, never mind people attempting to multiplayer edit it over network shares...), it's often very hard for non-programmers to get any insights on any data you threw on it without using Excel in the first place. So if the data is coming from Excel, and being extracted back to Excel, why use anything besides Excel?

surement 4y ago

You can already have "regular" people as software engineers if you follow basic concepts like the SOLID principles. Unfortunately many engineers are incredibly smart and they don't see the difference between writing spaghetti code with cryptic names and writing clear, legible code that normal people can follow. I've worked with people that could figure out a program written in binary if they needed to, but that meant that they never learned to write structured, sensible, readable programs.

thrown_22 4y ago

>We need more "Excels." More and better tools that let "regular" people program. The only reason why more people don't program is because Windows is antithetical to programming _anything_. The second you remove people from a windows environment is the moment they start coding, even by accident.

dkottow 4y ago

True, but just using Excel does not lead to decent data models, though. IMHO, what we would need is for "regular" folks to grasp the basics of relational database first (at least 1:n and n:1) and then build an easy to use excel-like tool around it.

solomatov 4y ago

>More and better tools that let "regular" people program. There's one catch with Excel, the more complicated your spreadsheet gets, the closer it gets to programming. And at some point, it's more cost effective to write in a proper programming language than continue to maintain mess. However, until this complexity level, Excel is great, and empowers a lot of people who barely know the basic features of Excel to solve their computational problems.

ParetoOptimal 4y ago

Simon Peyton Jones put some work towards that: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/podcast/advancing-excel-as-a-programming-language-with-andy-gordon-and-simon-peyton-jones/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/podcast/advancing-e... User defined functions: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/lambda-the-ultimatae-excel-worksheet-function/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/lambda-the-ult...