151–160 of 289 posts
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My first job was cleaning up the mess that was caused by hard coded yahoo finance urls in spreadsheets. One of them died, no one noticed and it cost the company millions of dollars in bad trades over three months.
are you suggesting programmers don't hardcode URLs in quick-and-dirty (and sometimes, even production) Python scripts/code?
I'm a research actuary working in reinsurance. Here is why I think Python creates more problems than it solves from the standpoint of most insurance business users: 1.) Environment management. There are many solutions for managing python dependencies, my favorite is Docker + pip. Good luck getting actuaries and underwriters to write Dockerfiles etc, and good luck getting I.T. to support Docker on Windows desktops. Li…
Funny story about Excel on corporate machines. A couple of years ago the company I work for got boight by an Italian company. When we finally migrated the Windows users over to the corporate Office installs a bunch of people found that Excel wouldn't work for them. Things like sum(A1:A20) were syntax errors. After a bunch of digging i worked out that the localisation from corporate meant they suddenly had Italian fun…
Do you have any pointers to learning materials on how to do this? Would be interested in reading more on it.
And costs 25 USD per month (but has a free trial).
Excel is never actually ditched.
edit: oh, that's only step 4. Step 5 is actually ditching Excel.
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Why doesn't annotating these functions with @functools.lru_cache(10000000) work?
Not sure why this is being downvoted since I don't think the OP has done a good job of showing evidence that this doesn't work for recursion. Your computer almost certainly WILL have enough space for all the stack frames necessary.
I'm a research actuary working in reinsurance. Here is why I think Python creates more problems than it solves from the standpoint of most insurance business users: 1.) Environment management. There are many solutions for managing python dependencies, my favorite is Docker + pip. Good luck getting actuaries and underwriters to write Dockerfiles etc, and good luck getting I.T. to support Docker on Windows desktops. Li…
Hey fellow reinsurance actuary! I totally agree that Excel has its place in modeling, especially one-offs, and your criticisms make sense. That said, we have been moving a lot of our calculations to Python. We have had way too many rickety tools to move files or send emails (“first you open this spreadsheet and click this button, then you open this spreadsheet and click this button, then...”), and way too many versio…
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> What does "A1 + SomeOtherTab:B2" mean? Excel offers the ability to name any cell or range of cells. Don't even have to search through menus or the ribbon, it's right there to the left of the formula bar. I'm well aware that the vast majority of Excel spreadsheets don't use named cells/ranges, but you can't really blame Excel for that. It couldn't be too much easier. Lots of Python programmers don't use comments or…
> Excel offers the ability to name any cell or range of cells Except almost nobody does. It's not intuitive or the way it's taught. > Lots of Python programmers don't use comments or descriptive variable names either. You have to have variable names in Python. If you want to give them shitty names, that's your bag, but unlike Excel, it's not an extra step. You also have to deal with the fact that every cell in a rang…
> You have to have variable names in Python
sure, but `(i, j, k)` isn't any more descriptive than A1 or B7 or CQ85759. `intOrderTotal` may seem better initially, until the summer intern creates `intOrderFinalTotal` (after tax) and `intOrderAllInFinalTotal` (after shipping and tax)
> every cell in a range has its own unique formula
you could use array formulas, or were you never taught those either?
> it's not the default behavior, takes extra steps,
Creating a Python virtual environment is not the default behavior, and it takes extra steps. So does using any packages beyond the standard library. So does source control. Or running Jupyter. Using classes, or type hints, or imports, are all not the "default" of one long script in a single file.
Excel isn't superior to Python, or the best tool to solve every type of problem. Excel has its place, Python has its place. But your specific little nitpicks here are a reflection of the user (who I presume is you) not on the tool itself.
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Why doesn't annotating these functions with @functools.lru_cache(10000000) work?
Not sure why this is being downvoted since I don't think the OP has done a good job of showing evidence that this doesn't work for recursion. Your computer almost certainly WILL have enough space for all the stack frames necessary.
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are you suggesting programmers don't hardcode URLs in quick-and-dirty (and sometimes, even production) Python scripts/code?
I'm suggesting they have logs.
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That's the thing, most Excel workbooks start out as a one-off then gradually get adapted and extended until they're load-bearing. They're often built by specialists in another dept who definitely wouldn't consider themselves programmers. Doing it 'properly' would probably mean having to spec put the problem, get a budget, maybe wait a few months for someone to look at it. And the same thing every time the requirement…
> until they're load-bearing This cannot be stressed enough. I've outlived generations of finance teams at many startups, and I've seen firsthand the masterpieces/abominations left behind in Excel. Imagine a dozen sheets with ad-hoc queried data copy/pasted from System A/B/C/D into Excel, with formulas that feed formulas that feed formulas. Sometimes columns are inputs (seasonality adjustments for monthly forecasts),…
It would take about 12 hours to calculate, and would error out before finishing about 30% of the time. It needed to be run once a day for something reasonably important.
I don't use Excel much these days, but I do point people to a video if they do plan on doing anything:
* [You suck at excel - Joel Spolsky](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c)