Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting • Hacker News Board

Post by _emacsomancer_ » Sat, Jun 09, 2018, 5:42 AM UTC

gglitch wrote: post #115

_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never actually used it (or Quickbooks), but does ledger have any way of exporting something that could imported by Quickbooks? > Very few are going to be able to deal with a text file of journal entries. QuickBooks is the standard for all small business accounting, like it or not. I always find this lowest-common-denominator as de facto standard depressing. It's how we end up with word processing documents as a…

I have recently learned a technical term for the scenario you're describing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium "Informally, a strategy profile is a Nash equilibrium if no player can do better by unilaterally changing his or her strategy. To see what this means, imagine that each player is told the strategies of the others. Suppose then that each player asks themselves: 'Knowing the strategies of the othe…

Thanks for this. I've been pondering whether the word-processing/QuickBooks strategy is a Nash equilibrium (at least from my admittedly shallow understanding of the term). So lots of people produce documents using Word or LibreOffice - so that's their strategy. Some group of people produce documents using LaTeX. I'm not sure that I see how this is a Nash equilibrium. The LaTeX people in some situations might gain an advantage by switching to the Word strategy for better interoperability. The Word people (in almost all situations) could gain an advantage by switching to the LaTeX strategy for the sake of using a sane paradigm.

Rather the word-processing situation (and likely the QuickBooks situation, though I know much less about accounting software) seems to be something like maximizing the lowering of perceived entry cost (in terms of learning to use the software) over all other factors (with resulting increasing in complexity for more advanced functions and poor flexibility).