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Besides the author whipping out the old, apocryphal 'QWERTY is the worst layout on purpose' factoid, very cool. The thing in Excel that always made my eyes blee
by alanctgardner2 14y ago
Besides the author whipping out the old, apocryphal 'QWERTY is the worst layout on purpose' factoid, very cool. The thing in Excel that always made my eyes bleed was nesting IF statements: the else block is passed as the second argument, leading to ridiculous bracket requirements. I suppose the way the devs would have you do it is put one IF per cell in some hidden cells, and SUM the results.
In short, Excel is powerful, but requires contorting your brain to get stuff done. It's like MS tricked the world into teaching millions of non-technical people BrainFuck.
- jahewson 14y agoIF as an expression isn't brainfuck, it's functional programming!
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y agoIF as an expression is C-like, it's the ternary operator.
- alanctgardner2 14y agoI just wish it had syntax like JS promises, so the closing brackets weren't such a mess...
- andylei 14y agoi think it wouldn't be that bad if you could have the cell formulas be autoformatted across multiple lines.
- mistercow 14y ago>the old, apocryphal 'QWERTY is the worst layout on purpose' factoid It's not exactly apocryphal, and the version given in TFA is roughly accurate, except for the "intentionally uncomfortable" part. It's not that QWERTY is uncomfortable on purpose. It's that it is optimized for making old typewriters not jam rather than comfort. I want to give the author props for not quoting the common (and certainly false) "QWERTY intentionally slows you down".