5 ms·
The spreadsheet is a simulation machine
- jkaptur 3y agoThis view of spreadsheets is 100% accurate, beautiful, and inspiring. Spreadsheets have brought the power of computation to everyone. ... but I love to contrast this view with the behavior that Joel Spolsky observed: "... We visited dozens of Excel customers, and did not see anyone using Excel to actually perform what you would call 'calculations.' Almost all of them were using Excel because it was a convenient way to create a table. [snip] Suddenly we understood why Lotus Improv, which was this fancy futuristic spreadsheet that was going to make Excel obsolete, had failed completely: because it was great at calculations, but terrible at creating tables, and everyone was using Excel for tables, not calculations." https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2012/01/06/how-trello-is-different/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2012/01/06/how-trello-is-diff...
- Gys 3y agoFantastic observation. I once saw someone calculating the sum of a column (just a few numbers, ok) with a calculator!
- creakingstairs 3y agoThere is a really famous screenshot in Korea of an old manager telling a new hire to NOT use excel functions and do it by hand (and shortly became a meme because of its absurdity). I’ve also heard similar things had happened in Japan.
- Something1234 3y agoThat should be considered a firable offense on the part of the manager and borderline professional malpractice. I need this screenshot.
- xeonmc 3y agoPlot twist: the manager is concerned with floating point precision and the calculation require fractions to be carried throughout
- Something1234 3y agoWell if it's in excel those fractions have already been destroyed. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/troubleshoot/excel/floating-point-arithmetic-inaccurate-result https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/troubleshoot/excel/...
- xeonmc 3y agoHence demanding it to be done by hand from original integer entries.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- creakingstairs 3y agoHere you go. The messages are a hoot. To paraphrase the last sentence: "There are appropriate tools for each tasks. Just like you don't use the knife that you use to slaughter cows to slaughter chickens. And computers are the knife to slaughter cows in this case." https://imgur.com/a/T4rrav4 https://imgur.com/a/T4rrav4
- AtlasBarfed 3y agoAlso why the hipster war on the table element was doomed to fail in html
- edvinbesic 3y agoWhat war are you referring to, and what hipsters? As someone who used tables extensively for layout at the time, there was never any war against it, just a desire for better layout via CSS which is what we have today (flexbox, grid). Calling it a war against tables for actual tabular data is a bit over the top.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- coldtea 3y agoOh, there definitely was a war. There was also a desire for a better layour (flexbox, grid) but there was a war against tables for layout ("not semantic") even when the other option was a pile of hacks and kludges based on "float".
- ethanbond 3y agoTable elements are pretty much completely absent from modern web dev though?
- goatlover 3y agoLayout yes. But not for tabular data, they're great for that.
- AtlasBarfed 3y agoYeah only took about six or seven major revisions.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- layer8 3y agoI remember an anecdote where some office worker after years of using Excel was very surprised to learn that the “tables program” could also do calculations.
- thedanbob 3y agoMy first real programming job involved creating cellular computation simulations for a physics professor. I used Excel and VBA... worked surprisingly well.
- alliao 3y agowith greater power comes greater responsibilities, I hereby present you https://eusprig.org/research-info/horror-stories/ https://eusprig.org/research-info/horror-stories/
- analog31 3y agoI wonder how many people made errors with adding machines. And data entry into apps. My hunch is that mistakes will be made.
- niccl 3y agoI can't find the reference, but: There's a building somewhere with the digits of pi painted on a ceiling. I presume it celebrates someone (maybe 18th Century) who calculated N digits. One of the numbers is painted larger and a different colour because it marks where the person first went wrong in the calculation
- alenrozac 3y agoExcel errors can carry to wrong decisions on a global level. https://theconversation.com/economists-an-excel-error-and-the-misguided-push-for-austerity-13584 https://theconversation.com/economists-an-excel-error-and-th...
- analog31 3y agoIndeed, and until another platform emerges for people do to consequential work, Excel will be where they make consequential mistakes.
- _dain_ 3y agoJust like Coca-Cola isn't competing with Pepsi, but with water; most B2B SaaS companies aren't competing with other SaaSes, but with Excel. Many of them don't even realize it. Excel seems to have a kind of "hacker repulsion field" that makes programmers consistently underestimate its capabilities. Did you know that nowadays it has lexical scoping, dynamically sized spill arrays, first class lambdas, map/filter/reduce in formulae? Plus an entire separate purely functional query language + a relational database-like thing for ETL work? Normies are flinging closures around!
- actionfromafar 3y agoThe repulsion field is incredibly strong. Even with known field harmonics and modulation frequency I just can’t get through!
- gofreddygo 3y agoJust imagine if middle management figured they could do thier stuff in Excel that they pay $Foo SaaS vendor 9k per month for. Yep, you guessed it they'd just do absolutely nothing.
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- parlortricks 3y agooh yeah, M Language is my jam. powerquery is awesome, ive made it do terrible things, and it worked great. Helped me troubleshoot python code by building the same script in powerquery/m language.
- mcbishop 3y agoCool that there have been radical improvements in recent years, that haven't broken legacy spreadsheets.
- eviks 3y agoHow does this make sense given the fact that both sell water? And Excel's capabilities are hidden behind an awful interface, so it's only natural that people are repulsed into the alternatives if they have the required knowledge/skills
- 29athrowaway 3y agoThe spreadsheet is like an automated abacus
- toss1 3y ago"an"//"billions of", all working at once
- upupupandaway 3y agoThere are very few pieces of software I have most respect for than Excel. It powers entire industries, from Finance to Science to Big Tech, is stable as hell, backward compatible, and won't stop innovating. And now you can run Python on it - I'd say it would dominate the world now, but it's already there.
- hiAndrewQuinn 3y agoI'm still waiting on one of my investment banker friends to drop me the link to whatever high powered Excel bootcamp they got pushed through in their first week to acquire their supernatural fluency with the thing. I could memorize all the keyboard shortcuts with Anki, but past that, I have no idea where to go next.