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These scripts were written by my father in the 1980s, he was a middle school science teacher and wrote these to help him manage classrooms. I think it’s a cool

These scripts were written by my father in the 1980s, he was a middle school science teacher and wrote these to help him manage classrooms. I think it’s a cool example of the way personal computing changed life in that era; he was never a software engineer, just a guy that needed to automate some tedious work. I encoded the BAS files in utf8 so they are easier to read.

tombert 2y ago
A bit tangential, but I had a chemistry teacher in high school (~2007) who I liked a lot, but was not super tech-savy. I was staying after class to get some help with a homework assignment, but we ended up chatting a bit because he was funny and very friendly. He mentioned how long grades took him to calculate because he had a lot of custom weighting for stuff, and he was doing everything with a Texas Instruments calculator, and he was dreading it because the semester was almost over. I said something like "Couldn't you do this with Excel or something?" He didn't really know what Excel was, but my dad had like a week before taught me how to use it for basic number crunching stuff, so I loaded it up on his computer, and showed him some very basic arithmetic stuff, and how to use cells as variables and roughly how copying and pasting worked. He was immediately amazed and I left feeling super smart. The next week, I chatted with him again, and he had completely overtaken my Excel ability. He learned a bunch of little tricks I was unfamiliar with, had redone all of the gradebooks with it, added a lot of conditionals, color coding, and I think might have even been using the VBA. He also added graphs to look at how much he had to curve things and to see if tests were fair. It was life-changing for him; a task that used to take him hours of manual work was reduced to about fifteen minutes of playing copypaste. Excel is particularly interesting to me, because it's very immediately useful, but you can also go super deep with learning new features, and it keeps getting more useful!
- glimshe 2y ago
  Spreadsheets are one of the best technological advancements in the past 100 years - and I'm not exaggerating. There is just so much you can do with them; they are probably the most accessible way for a human to access the power of CPUs and computation. For most problems, I'd rather use a spreadsheet than a general-purpose programming language, because the spreadsheet itself offers a quick away to leverage data structures and functions.
  - tombert 2y ago
    Yep, completely agree. I remember I saw a talk six or seven years ago where they said something to effect of "spreadsheets are the best programming language because they allow people to program without even realizing they're programming", and I agree with that sentiment. They give you access to a lot of programming logic, they're visual, they're reactive, they're easy to learn, and maybe most importantly, the results are instant. Instead of having to try and understand data types and scope and having to run a program from scratch for every change, you can just change a value and see the result right away. I use spreadsheets for nearly anything involving "numbers" (outside of stuff with lots and lots of data), because it's a lot less of a headache than setting up a "real" language. They're wonderful.

tombert 2y ago

A bit tangential, but I had a chemistry teacher in high school (~2007) who I liked a lot, but was not super tech-savy. I was staying after class to get some help with a homework assignment, but we ended up chatting a bit because he was funny and very friendly. He mentioned how long grades took him to calculate because he had a lot of custom weighting for stuff, and he was doing everything with a Texas Instruments calculator, and he was dreading it because the semester was almost over. I said something like "Couldn't you do this with Excel or something?" He didn't really know what Excel was, but my dad had like a week before taught me how to use it for basic number crunching stuff, so I loaded it up on his computer, and showed him some very basic arithmetic stuff, and how to use cells as variables and roughly how copying and pasting worked. He was immediately amazed and I left feeling super smart. The next week, I chatted with him again, and he had completely overtaken my Excel ability. He learned a bunch of little tricks I was unfamiliar with, had redone all of the gradebooks with it, added a lot of conditionals, color coding, and I think might have even been using the VBA. He also added graphs to look at how much he had to curve things and to see if tests were fair. It was life-changing for him; a task that used to take him hours of manual work was reduced to about fifteen minutes of playing copypaste. Excel is particularly interesting to me, because it's very immediately useful, but you can also go super deep with learning new features, and it keeps getting more useful!

glimshe 2y ago
Spreadsheets are one of the best technological advancements in the past 100 years - and I'm not exaggerating. There is just so much you can do with them; they are probably the most accessible way for a human to access the power of CPUs and computation. For most problems, I'd rather use a spreadsheet than a general-purpose programming language, because the spreadsheet itself offers a quick away to leverage data structures and functions.
- tombert 2y ago
  Yep, completely agree. I remember I saw a talk six or seven years ago where they said something to effect of "spreadsheets are the best programming language because they allow people to program without even realizing they're programming", and I agree with that sentiment. They give you access to a lot of programming logic, they're visual, they're reactive, they're easy to learn, and maybe most importantly, the results are instant. Instead of having to try and understand data types and scope and having to run a program from scratch for every change, you can just change a value and see the result right away. I use spreadsheets for nearly anything involving "numbers" (outside of stuff with lots and lots of data), because it's a lot less of a headache than setting up a "real" language. They're wonderful.