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Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates

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Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates

#151

Post by kaesar14 »

meow1032 wrote: post #135
gameswithgo wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it would be nice if everyone was expert at everything, but they cant be. it would be nice if they hired experts but money doesn’t grow on trees. we often insist on a degree of excellence we refuse to pay for

It's not about being an expert at everything or hiring more people. These aren't particularly hard problems, it's not difficult to find biologists who are incredibly adept at using python, R or C. It's about thinking about how science gets funded and how it gets implemented. I've written here before about the difference between "grant work" and "grunt work", and how too computer touching tends to get looked down upon…

What's your source on it not being difficult to find biologists who are adept at using python, R, or C? Most biologists operating in private industry or academia have many years of training in their fields and many have learned their computational tools as they've gone on, meaning they've never received proper training. It seems dubious to claim that there's this neverending source of well trained biologists who are also adept at programming.

Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates

#152

Post by bad_user »

airstrike wrote: post #141
LatteLazy wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you've failed to grasp the issue, it's way more than just things I type sadly. It prevents the use csv files for many purposes. That stops excel users interacting with the wider ecosystem of file\data processing systems...

I think the reasoning is people type in "01/02" to actually mean Jan 2nd more often than they import CSVs into Excel. So Microsoft favored one over the other I don't see a problem with that, as it's not undefined behavior – you know exactly how Excel will treat those values

"01/02" does not translate to Jan 2nd in most of the world, because DMY is much more popular than MDY.

Excel is biased for US users.

Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates

#154

Post by lordnacho »

jrott wrote: post #88
lordnacho wrote: post #44

The problem is that your average business user of Excel thinks type safety is a bug, not a feature. If Excel enforced types instead of guessing on your behalf, a lot of people would complain. And it would be really hard to explain why it is sometimes useful to have constraints to someone who normally sees Excel's flexibility as its main strength. I don't think I've ever seen a non coder use Excel in a sensible way: m…

Yeah excel produces hairballs so easily. From a coder perspective I've only seen excel workbooks that are bad or terrifying. On the other hand a ton of people that don't write software for a living and have no interest in code manage to produce things that help them do their job and automate a ton of tedious stuff.

Most people don't write novels or poetry for a living either, but we still need some grasp of basic writing skills like grammar and structuring. We're already moving towards a future where a lot of people have coding as part of their job, and we should expect them to know a few things.

Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates

#155

Post by Cactus2018 »

yardstick wrote: post #123
dr_orpheus wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having Excel be the default for .csv files has caused me problems in the past as well with Excel automatically changing data when you open it. The unfortunate thing I have come across multiple times is a csv file that has some values with a lot of significant figures, i.e. 123456789876, 987654321234 After opening in Excel it will convert these to: 1.23E+11, 9.87E+11 Then resaving the file (as a csv) will store the va…

Same here, but with IMEI numbers. Excel silently truncates them, it’s frustrating. Why can’t the auto format detect and just store them in text format?

Why can't there be a flag (defaulted to off) to control auto formatting

Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates

#157

Post by 3pt14159 »

takluyver wrote: post #130
fabian2k wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We programmers also complain a lot about YAML, though maybe not enough and not as much as about Excel. But some YAML footguns like the country code for Norway being interpreted as a boolean are reasonably famous, and I think widely regarded as a bad idea.

To be fair, there are few things programmers don't complain about. But YAML still seems to be very popular as a configuration format for new tools, e.g. CI services.

I wish everyone would just switch to TOML. It's sane and readable.

Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates

#158

Post by LatteLazy »

airstrike wrote: post #141
LatteLazy wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you've failed to grasp the issue, it's way more than just things I type sadly. It prevents the use csv files for many purposes. That stops excel users interacting with the wider ecosystem of file\data processing systems...

I think the reasoning is people type in "01/02" to actually mean Jan 2nd more often than they import CSVs into Excel. So Microsoft favored one over the other I don't see a problem with that, as it's not undefined behavior – you know exactly how Excel will treat those values

The problem is they destroy the original data.

If they want rawdata="01/02" to display as "Jan-02" (or whatever), that's annoying but I can fix it. But they also delete the raw data and replace it with "43862". Reformatting cannot fix that and it is Excel that has chosen to actively break it.

They're not even self consistent with this: If I carefully make sure the data is correct (use "'01/02"), then save as csv and load the same file, it breaks. What sort of program can't save\load without losing data!?

That's without touching why they need to interfere or whether the US standard is the correct one to use or that fact excel is no where near this aggressive with any other data format.

(edited to correct feb to jan)

Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates

#159

Post by shpongled »

kaesar14 wrote: post #151
meow1032 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about being an expert at everything or hiring more people. These aren't particularly hard problems, it's not difficult to find biologists who are incredibly adept at using python, R or C. It's about thinking about how science gets funded and how it gets implemented. I've written here before about the difference between "grant work" and "grunt work", and how too computer touching tends to get looked down upon…

What's your source on it not being difficult to find biologists who are adept at using python, R, or C? Most biologists operating in private industry or academia have many years of training in their fields and many have learned their computational tools as they've gone on, meaning they've never received proper training. It seems dubious to claim that there's this neverending source of well trained biologists who are…

I would say the number of biologists who actually understand programming is extremely small. I've been programming for fun for ~15 years, and I'm about to finish a PhD in chemical biology (e.g. I started programming in C far before I started learning biology).

You might occasionally run into someone who is passable - at best - with R or Python. But most of the code they might write is going to be extremely linear, and I doubt they understand software architecture or control flow at all.

I don't know any biologists who program for fun like me (currently writing a compiler in Rust).

Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates

#160

Post by fnbr »

tremon wrote: post #138
spuz wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is "06.08.2020" unambiguous?

There are no conventions that write a date as mm.dd.yyyy, so if you encounter a date in that format, it is safe to assume dd.mm.yyyy. Contrast this with the slash or dash notation, where both mm/dd/yyyy and dd/mm/yyyy are prevalent in the world. But 2020-08-06 is unambiguous in the same way that 06.08.2020 is: the only convention in common use is yyyy-mm-dd.

Unfortunately, this isn’t true in Canada. MDY is very common, especially in the English parts. See:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country

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