8 ms·

I fully understand, but what would you recommended to an accountant? a business analyst without technical aptitude? a business owner, again with zero programmin

by 2rsf 4y ago

I fully understand, but what would you recommended to an accountant? a business analyst without technical aptitude? a business owner, again with zero programming aptitude? Excel is intuitive to begin with, it gets ugly fast and almost impossible to debug but for small sets of data it is very easy to explain how to use it and you get results fast.

golergka 4y ago
They could just use Visual Basic right in Excel instead.
- TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
  Or they could install Visual Studio and start writing .NET applications. Common, regular users often does not even know that Excel can do formulas and are filling single cells with calculator manually.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Actually when I went back to desktop Windows development for a while on life sciences, that is exactly what many researchers did after they outgrew VBA, asking IT to get VB.NET on their desktops. No R, no Python, VB.NET it was.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
constantcrying 4y ago
Excel and spreadsheet software in general is great for certain things. It just scales horribly, it is inherently opaque and naturally hides the relations between its parts. People actually use it as a general programming language, which leads to inherently unmaintainable and hard to understand software.
RalfWausE 4y ago
Seriously: APL! Yeah, it takes a bit of time to become really comfortable, but our accountant was (after the initial take-it-away! phase) really glad i have her introduced to it
- capableweb 4y ago
  I'd hesitate recommend a language whose symbols are not easily accessible or understandable. Try showing the following snippet to even a seasoned programmer and they'll struggle to understand what it does: Avg←{(+⌿⍵)÷≢⍵} Also, if you want a non-programmer to quickly be able to learn a language, the more learning resources they have available to them, the more probable it is that they'll be able to pick it up. APL probably don't have as many modern, free and online resources as other languages.
  - jxy 4y ago
    Yet you cherry picked an extension that's not in the ISO standard and only modern APL supports.
    - capableweb 4y ago
      Sorry about that, I don't APL well myself to know what parts belong to what. I simply searched for "APL hello world" and landed on https://tryapl.org/ https://tryapl.org/ which has that snippet on the left side. The "Examples" section on the Wikipedia page for APL also contains a bunch of symbols I would have no idea how to enter on a computer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_(programming_language)#Examples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_(programming_language)#Exa...
      - jxy 4y ago
        The whole point is not whether you, without any learning, would have any idea how to read, speak, think in any specific language. You likely have forgot how long you had to learn English. Do you know how many people in the world have no idea what you had written here, yet they are still very comfortable in using a computer? It's easy for an English speaking person to consider programming languages in English as the only kind that's usable. To be fair, English dominates in the tech world. But it would be narrow minded to dismiss a programming language solely based on its non-English symbols. Mathematicians have long been using symbols for efficiency in its expressiveness. Why not programming languages? I'd like to keep an open mind.

by 2rsf 4y ago

golergka 4y ago

They could just use Visual Basic right in Excel instead.

TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
Or they could install Visual Studio and start writing .NET applications. Common, regular users often does not even know that Excel can do formulas and are filling single cells with calculator manually.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Actually when I went back to desktop Windows development for a while on life sciences, that is exactly what many researchers did after they outgrew VBA, asking IT to get VB.NET on their desktops. No R, no Python, VB.NET it was.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

constantcrying 4y ago

Excel and spreadsheet software in general is great for certain things. It just scales horribly, it is inherently opaque and naturally hides the relations between its parts. People actually use it as a general programming language, which leads to inherently unmaintainable and hard to understand software.

RalfWausE 4y ago

Seriously: APL! Yeah, it takes a bit of time to become really comfortable, but our accountant was (after the initial take-it-away! phase) really glad i have her introduced to it

capableweb 4y ago
I'd hesitate recommend a language whose symbols are not easily accessible or understandable. Try showing the following snippet to even a seasoned programmer and they'll struggle to understand what it does: Avg←{(+⌿⍵)÷≢⍵} Also, if you want a non-programmer to quickly be able to learn a language, the more learning resources they have available to them, the more probable it is that they'll be able to pick it up. APL probably don't have as many modern, free and online resources as other languages.
- jxy 4y ago
  Yet you cherry picked an extension that's not in the ISO standard and only modern APL supports.
  - capableweb 4y ago
    Sorry about that, I don't APL well myself to know what parts belong to what. I simply searched for "APL hello world" and landed on https://tryapl.org/ https://tryapl.org/ which has that snippet on the left side. The "Examples" section on the Wikipedia page for APL also contains a bunch of symbols I would have no idea how to enter on a computer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_(programming_language)#Examples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_(programming_language)#Exa...
    - jxy 4y ago
      The whole point is not whether you, without any learning, would have any idea how to read, speak, think in any specific language. You likely have forgot how long you had to learn English. Do you know how many people in the world have no idea what you had written here, yet they are still very comfortable in using a computer? It's easy for an English speaking person to consider programming languages in English as the only kind that's usable. To be fair, English dominates in the tech world. But it would be narrow minded to dismiss a programming language solely based on its non-English symbols. Mathematicians have long been using symbols for efficiency in its expressiveness. Why not programming languages? I'd like to keep an open mind.