Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Stencila: An open source office suite for reproducible research

stenci.la

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 51 posts

Re: Stencila: An open source office suite for reproducible research

#11

Post by osrec »

antt wrote: post #10
osrec wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firstly, I would like to thank you for your work. Open office has served me very well during my school and university days. Since joining the world of work, I've struggled with the following: - Random crashes every couple of hours when files become large. Especially in Impress and Calc. - I do a lot of diagrams in OODraw. Sometimes I'll reopen the file to find arrows and connectors have moved. - The interface could b…

> investment banker As someone who was a software engineer in a brokerage and had to deal with clients excel sheets: open/libre office not letting you do that is a feature. We would be given excel sheet that would depend on a specific version of Excel. We had sheets in the hundreds of megabytes. We had sheets that would take overnight to run. We had sheets with sheet dependencies. We had sheets that needed to be run…

Yes, I too have seen those spreadsheets, but it's not Excel that's at fault, it's the users. I've taken XLS behemoths and trimmed them down to a fraction of their size and optimised sheets that ran overnight, to recalculate in seconds. I get what you're saying about Excel giving too much power in incapable hands, but I feel, for certain use cases, OO is too little power in even the most capable hands.

Re: Stencila: An open source office suite for reproducible research

#12

Post by sheetjs »

osrec wrote: post #5

This looks interesting. I'm actually rather surprised at the lack of quality in most open source 'office' alternatives. I'm not sure why, but open/libreoffice is almost unusable for heavy duty office work. Microsoft products are the clear winners if you require productivity and stability. I really hope that changes soon, because I feel it's a major factor that holds back widespread Linux adoption.

There's a ton of mindnumbing testing and grinding work that honestly no one really wants to do, involving bit-level accuracy in many cases. We (https://sheetjs.com/) are attacking the file compatibility problem (our major open source project is https://github.com/sheetjs/js-xlsx, used in stencila's spreadsheet converters) and it is painfully obvious that OO/LO cuts corners at certain places. For example, the mathematics of Calc is intentionally bugged:

> ignore the last two bits for many stuff to improve the user experience.

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=83511

A successful alternative to Microsoft Office has to start from a level of compatibility that no current developer in existing solutions has expressed interest in attaining.

Re: Stencila: An open source office suite for reproducible research

#13

Post by watersb »

antt wrote: post #10
osrec wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firstly, I would like to thank you for your work. Open office has served me very well during my school and university days. Since joining the world of work, I've struggled with the following: - Random crashes every couple of hours when files become large. Especially in Impress and Calc. - I do a lot of diagrams in OODraw. Sometimes I'll reopen the file to find arrows and connectors have moved. - The interface could b…

> investment banker As someone who was a software engineer in a brokerage and had to deal with clients excel sheets: open/libre office not letting you do that is a feature. We would be given excel sheet that would depend on a specific version of Excel. We had sheets in the hundreds of megabytes. We had sheets that would take overnight to run. We had sheets with sheet dependencies. We had sheets that needed to be run…

Before Python, before Perl, before I grew up and got a real job, I worked in a lab that relied upon the Ingres spreadsheet application to reduce experimental data. At the time, it was a Macintosh-only application, and its scripting support was actually very good, but validating the dsta was a very slow process and ran overnight.

I re-wrote the process in AWK, and was able to complete the data-reduction task in about 60 seconds on a DEC 5000 workstation. But my numbers did not match the spreadsheet results, and finding out why was an interesting process.

I then encountered small, remote offices of big international firms -- usually real-estate, insurance companies -- that had limited local IT support. It was Excel macros all the way down.

And then a large biotech firm, where it took KPMG analysts a few months to determine that our entire business relied upon this one guy's spreadsheet.

So yeah.

But:

Excel dies, let us suppose... What will these people come up with? Alexa queries?

I have preferences other than Python, but mostly I csn read code written by the scientists who wrote them. They may be abominations, like global state variables and magic numbers, but they are readable.

Is Python any reason to hope for a better world?

(Hmm. Off-topic, perhaps. Your story woke some memories of tough IT experiences.)

Re: Stencila: An open source office suite for reproducible research

#14

Post by osrec »

sheetjs wrote: post #12
osrec wrote: post #5

This looks interesting. I'm actually rather surprised at the lack of quality in most open source 'office' alternatives. I'm not sure why, but open/libreoffice is almost unusable for heavy duty office work. Microsoft products are the clear winners if you require productivity and stability. I really hope that changes soon, because I feel it's a major factor that holds back widespread Linux adoption.

There's a ton of mindnumbing testing and grinding work that honestly no one really wants to do, involving bit-level accuracy in many cases. We ( https://sheetjs.com/ ) are attacking the file compatibility problem (our major open source project is https://github.com/sheetjs/js-xlsx , used in stencila's spreadsheet converters) and it is painfully obvious that OO/LO cuts corners at certain places. For example, the mathe…

Interesting. In your experience, do you think heavy duty, in-browser office applications are now viable? I'm beginning to think they are, especially with the likes of web assembly becoming more ubiquitous.

Re: Stencila: An open source office suite for reproducible research

#15

Post by viraptor »

watersb wrote: post #13
antt wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> investment banker As someone who was a software engineer in a brokerage and had to deal with clients excel sheets: open/libre office not letting you do that is a feature. We would be given excel sheet that would depend on a specific version of Excel. We had sheets in the hundreds of megabytes. We had sheets that would take overnight to run. We had sheets with sheet dependencies. We had sheets that needed to be run…

Before Python, before Perl, before I grew up and got a real job, I worked in a lab that relied upon the Ingres spreadsheet application to reduce experimental data. At the time, it was a Macintosh-only application, and its scripting support was actually very good, but validating the dsta was a very slow process and ran overnight. I re-wrote the process in AWK, and was able to complete the data-reduction task in about…

> Excel dies, let us suppose... What will these people come up with?

Ideally, excel with separated actual use cases, which the original app merges into one thing:

- data entry into tables

- auto-generated tables over some ranges (dates, counts)

- constants / described values (they end up on a side, sometimes in a named cell if you're lucky)

- presentation/report layer

I think Access did some good things, but is too close to be database to be comfortable. BI to is great for the last part, but it's a separate/expensive product.

Re: Stencila: An open source office suite for reproducible research

#17

Post by buchanae »

> The calls for research to be transparent and reproducible have never been louder. But today's tools for reproducible research can be intimidating - especially if you're not a coder.

As someone (a software engineer) who has been trying (struggling) to reproduce biology research lately, I say amen. Hallelujah.

But. It's time to accept coding as a core skill. Science has more to learn from software engineering than it realizes. Software engineering (aka coding) eats reproducibility for breakfast, even when hundreds or thousands of "collaborators" are involved. These days, it's rare for a single biology researcher to produce (publish) code that is easily reproducible by an external researcher.

Re: Stencila: An open source office suite for reproducible research

#18

Post by jsilence »

Interresting!

Does Stencilla offer any kind of author collaboration? Publication are usually not one person efforts and research teams oftentimes are not working in the same location.

In my experience the GDocs or Word comments and revise mode are heavily used in collaborations.

Re: Stencila: An open source office suite for reproducible research

#19

Post by tincholio »

buchanae wrote: post #17

> The calls for research to be transparent and reproducible have never been louder. But today's tools for reproducible research can be intimidating - especially if you're not a coder. As someone (a software engineer) who has been trying (struggling) to reproduce biology research lately, I say amen. Hallelujah. But. It's time to accept coding as a core skill. Science has more to learn from software engineering than it…

It's a bit more complex than that, as it's not just having access to the software, but to the whole environment. The move towards reproducible builds and configurations (Nix and the like) is a good thing for this, as well.
Post reply on HN