3 ms·

This is such a weird body for comments. You have devs in here shrugging and saying "hey it works, no big deal" when it comes to a business process. But if it c

This is such a weird body for comments. You have devs in here shrugging and saying "hey it works, no big deal" when it comes to a business process. But if it comes to svelte vs react vs whatever it's a butlerian jihad where everyone's accusing eachother of not even knowing how to program. sometimes I wonder if most of us do the job to play with silly tools rather than actually make shit.

pjc50 3y ago
There's a very "bikeshedding" property at work where the fewer "real" consequences come from a decision, the more heated the discussion gets because it's purely opinionated. (there are also a number of HN commentators who are reliably noisily wrong about things, but not in such a blatant way that they get obliterated in downvotes, and one of them started that top level thread)
- tormeh 3y ago
  See pineapple on pizza. It's fun to discuss precisely because of how trivial it is, not despite it.
TeMPOraL 3y ago
> sometimes I wonder if most of us do the job to play with silly tools rather than actually make shit. Yes? I thought this is common knowledge. Here's a universal tool whose potential is limited only by one's imagination, and yet most of the jobs in our profession are at best boring - the high-paying ones usually involve making actively harmful things that shouldn't exist in the first place (see e.g. whole adtech for starters), and most of the rest are so mired in office politics or business constraints that the outcomes are guaranteed to be shit. A lot of strangeness in the dev culture can be viewed as coping mechanisms. Meanwhile, after doing this work long enough, you end up realizing that disturbingly many SaaS tools offer much less utility and worse ergonomics than an Excel spreadsheet.
- tight-ship 3y ago
  It's just a reflection of humanity in general. Nothing special.
- Pat_Murph 3y ago
  Often I can do what I need in a few minutes in excel where à programmer would take hours and not give me what I actually asked for. And in excel I can modify and update my work. Where a programme solution is static and needs tons more hours for every change needed. Often we see people claiming that "This new thing is the spreadsheet killer, like ai at the moment. People have been saying this forever but spreadsheets are still here. And there's a good reason for it.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    There are only two things I've seen that ever came close to actual "spreadsheet killers" - MS Access and computational notebooks (Jupyter, Observable webapp). And it so happens that both are very similar in principle to Excel spreadsheets. They're optimized for certain paradigm (reactive cells, RDBMS CRUD, reactive cells accepting code and outputting rich content), but otherwise don't constrain you - instead, they invite you to build your thing incrementally, figuring your problem out as you build the solution, with full visibility into intermediate states. The only way AI has a chance of killing spreadsheets is if it replaces a Real Programmers, by becoming a tool that lets anyone interactively build arbitrary apps, for free (on the margin), with near zero turnaround.
  - _a_a_a_ 3y ago
    > Often I can do what I need in a few minutes in excel where à programmer would take hours and not give me what I actually asked for That's likely not down to the tool, more likely a complex requirement you understand but they don't. (And are you sure you're getting the right answer? IIRC an analysis showed 10% of spreadsheets have errors - devs do care about good results, and that does take extra time) > Where a programme solution is static and needs tons more hours for every change needed. Hmm. Sounds like there's something wrong here, with your guys or some aspect of the business (and sure, excel is not a bad tool, just to be clear).
potatopatch 3y ago
We should create an internal tool that relies on a framework which needs quarterly code changing updates for a yearly(?) administrative process with less than 24 candidates? IMO the arguments people make in frontend are similar to the infinite scaling requirements in back end that require 10X overpriced machine rental. Whether or not the current site could ever be appropriate for all 10 billion users, a developer wants the universal skills tuned to the top end. A university HR employee OTOH probably realizes they won't code themselves if they end up at the largest employer on Earth.
impostervt 3y ago
As in religion, it's the minor differences that lead to major wars. Major differences let you say "well that's just what THOSE people do". It's not a threat to your sense of self. Minor differences challenge your own sense of self, and thus must be destroyed.
0x445442 3y ago
Hey, it’s not just playing with the silly tools. It’s showing how smart I am by displaying my arcane knowledge of the silly tool.
helsinkiandrew 3y ago
Excel is superb for automating/number crunching short lived business processes or those that are one offs or change rapidly. Especially if you don't have technical resources available to do it any other way. The biggest issue they had was not understanding that the data from one area (Wales) was in a different format from the others - an integer that represented rank (lowest being best) rather than a test score - that would probably still not been noticed if they'd used something else.

pjc50 3y ago

There's a very "bikeshedding" property at work where the fewer "real" consequences come from a decision, the more heated the discussion gets because it's purely opinionated. (there are also a number of HN commentators who are reliably noisily wrong about things, but not in such a blatant way that they get obliterated in downvotes, and one of them started that top level thread)

tormeh 3y ago
See pineapple on pizza. It's fun to discuss precisely because of how trivial it is, not despite it.

TeMPOraL 3y ago

> sometimes I wonder if most of us do the job to play with silly tools rather than actually make shit. Yes? I thought this is common knowledge. Here's a universal tool whose potential is limited only by one's imagination, and yet most of the jobs in our profession are at best boring - the high-paying ones usually involve making actively harmful things that shouldn't exist in the first place (see e.g. whole adtech for starters), and most of the rest are so mired in office politics or business constraints that the outcomes are guaranteed to be shit. A lot of strangeness in the dev culture can be viewed as coping mechanisms. Meanwhile, after doing this work long enough, you end up realizing that disturbingly many SaaS tools offer much less utility and worse ergonomics than an Excel spreadsheet.

tight-ship 3y ago
It's just a reflection of humanity in general. Nothing special.
Pat_Murph 3y ago
Often I can do what I need in a few minutes in excel where à programmer would take hours and not give me what I actually asked for. And in excel I can modify and update my work. Where a programme solution is static and needs tons more hours for every change needed. Often we see people claiming that "This new thing is the spreadsheet killer, like ai at the moment. People have been saying this forever but spreadsheets are still here. And there's a good reason for it.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  There are only two things I've seen that ever came close to actual "spreadsheet killers" - MS Access and computational notebooks (Jupyter, Observable webapp). And it so happens that both are very similar in principle to Excel spreadsheets. They're optimized for certain paradigm (reactive cells, RDBMS CRUD, reactive cells accepting code and outputting rich content), but otherwise don't constrain you - instead, they invite you to build your thing incrementally, figuring your problem out as you build the solution, with full visibility into intermediate states. The only way AI has a chance of killing spreadsheets is if it replaces a Real Programmers, by becoming a tool that lets anyone interactively build arbitrary apps, for free (on the margin), with near zero turnaround.
- _a_a_a_ 3y ago
  > Often I can do what I need in a few minutes in excel where à programmer would take hours and not give me what I actually asked for That's likely not down to the tool, more likely a complex requirement you understand but they don't. (And are you sure you're getting the right answer? IIRC an analysis showed 10% of spreadsheets have errors - devs do care about good results, and that does take extra time) > Where a programme solution is static and needs tons more hours for every change needed. Hmm. Sounds like there's something wrong here, with your guys or some aspect of the business (and sure, excel is not a bad tool, just to be clear).

potatopatch 3y ago

We should create an internal tool that relies on a framework which needs quarterly code changing updates for a yearly(?) administrative process with less than 24 candidates? IMO the arguments people make in frontend are similar to the infinite scaling requirements in back end that require 10X overpriced machine rental. Whether or not the current site could ever be appropriate for all 10 billion users, a developer wants the universal skills tuned to the top end. A university HR employee OTOH probably realizes they won't code themselves if they end up at the largest employer on Earth.

impostervt 3y ago

As in religion, it's the minor differences that lead to major wars. Major differences let you say "well that's just what THOSE people do". It's not a threat to your sense of self. Minor differences challenge your own sense of self, and thus must be destroyed.

0x445442 3y ago

Hey, it’s not just playing with the silly tools. It’s showing how smart I am by displaying my arcane knowledge of the silly tool.

helsinkiandrew 3y ago

Excel is superb for automating/number crunching short lived business processes or those that are one offs or change rapidly. Especially if you don't have technical resources available to do it any other way. The biggest issue they had was not understanding that the data from one area (Wales) was in a different format from the others - an integer that represented rank (lowest being best) rather than a test score - that would probably still not been noticed if they'd used something else.