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Sounds to me like the author had a painful introduction to the vintage platform tools of Unix. The crux of his rant is: > I prefer spreadsheet software though.

Sounds to me like the author had a painful introduction to the vintage platform tools of Unix. The crux of his rant is: > I prefer spreadsheet software though. Maybe the newer zips of XML are not exactly obfuscated blobs, but I’d wager he’s happy with Excel where he sees coworkers using text interchange formats. I guess he solves different problems than I do. > Have you noticed that most developers use IDEs that “understand” the code and not Notepad? So, in a setting where Microsoft platform tools are available, he’s confronted with scripting that relies on the vintage Unix tools. I’ve seen many people succeed blithely where the author feels pained and challenged.

infogulch 4y ago
Is it hard to acknowledge that the spreadsheet application category is well designed and fit for purpose? Arguably spreadsheets were the "killer app" that made personal computers mainstream in the first place.
- ttyprintk 4y ago
  I see your point, and I recall Lotus 123 blowing minds. But this post is about the cultures of spreadsheets and System V tools not combining into something stronger. I think spreadsheets just demand constant interactivity and the command line promotes automation. They didn’t combine and the process of transforming data didn’t fledge its own killer app in time for the author. The formula interface is so weird that you sometimes have to ctrl-shift-enter to color your function for vectorized input. And the terminal interface doesn’t even respect previous calculations, they just wash upward without a first-class printscreen. At one point, if you use Excel’s statistical routines you risked malpractice because it calculated sum-of-squares wrong in a way that would have been caught in a simple unit test. And using the command-line for accounting is utterly masochistic.
  - ttyprintk 4y ago
    I feel fairly balanced in the middle of the Overton window on the difference between spreadsheet culture and process culture: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34968457#34968652 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34968457#34968652

infogulch 4y ago

Is it hard to acknowledge that the spreadsheet application category is well designed and fit for purpose? Arguably spreadsheets were the "killer app" that made personal computers mainstream in the first place.

ttyprintk 4y ago
I see your point, and I recall Lotus 123 blowing minds. But this post is about the cultures of spreadsheets and System V tools not combining into something stronger. I think spreadsheets just demand constant interactivity and the command line promotes automation. They didn’t combine and the process of transforming data didn’t fledge its own killer app in time for the author. The formula interface is so weird that you sometimes have to ctrl-shift-enter to color your function for vectorized input. And the terminal interface doesn’t even respect previous calculations, they just wash upward without a first-class printscreen. At one point, if you use Excel’s statistical routines you risked malpractice because it calculated sum-of-squares wrong in a way that would have been caught in a simple unit test. And using the command-line for accounting is utterly masochistic.
- ttyprintk 4y ago
  I feel fairly balanced in the middle of the Overton window on the difference between spreadsheet culture and process culture: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34968457#34968652 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34968457#34968652