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Ditching Excel for Python in a legacy industry

amypeniston.com

281–289 of 289 posts

Re: Ditching Excel for Python in a legacy industry

#281
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All good anecdotes, but I’m still kind of stuck on the whole you got to work at a pie factory thing

(Sorry, misty eyed recollection alert) I should point out that "pies" in the UK is a rather generic term. MBOs (mince beef and onion), sausage rolls, pasties, pork pies and quiche was made in this south Devon based factory, near Plymouth. It was a good corp citizen thing to attend the 1100 "taste panel" which was part of the quality process. Obviously Product Dev, QA and the line crews could not mark their own work s…

this is an amazing story, thank you!

Re: Ditching Excel for Python in a legacy industry

#283
post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... and then you have two problems. I have never seen an environment converted to SharePoint that didn't suffer badly from the conversion. And the Excel vs source control issue isn't history, it's "go ahead and try to diff between two versions of an Excel sheet" vs "diff two versions of that source file". Unless I've never heard of the tool that can digest two Excel sheets and tell you what formulas differ, or cells.…

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/overview-of-sprea...

Late response over the holidays, but honestly thank you. In years of Excel usage, I've never stumbled on that or had anyone mention it.

I will look into that as Excel 2016 is one of my current required work apps.

Re: Ditching Excel for Python in a legacy industry

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Sorry, misty eyed recollection alert) I should point out that "pies" in the UK is a rather generic term. MBOs (mince beef and onion), sausage rolls, pasties, pork pies and quiche was made in this south Devon based factory, near Plymouth. It was a good corp citizen thing to attend the 1100 "taste panel" which was part of the quality process. Obviously Product Dev, QA and the line crews could not mark their own work s…

I helped to sell System 36s (the big ones that took half a room) back in early 1980s. I remember one demo when a potential customer asked "If it's this slow with one user how slow is it with six?" The person doing the demo "improvised" with "It's dynamic load time balancing." Which I'd never heard of before. Turns out neither had anyone else involved with the System 36. I later came across a whole insurance company t…

I had to tickle one of the fans to get it started otherwise the bloody thing would shut down about 40 mins after IPL started. One summer we put bags of solid CO2 in it to keep under the temp threshold.

I still giggle hysterically when someone deploys the "enterprise" keyword at me.

Re: Ditching Excel for Python in a legacy industry

#285
post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Sorry, misty eyed recollection alert) I should point out that "pies" in the UK is a rather generic term. MBOs (mince beef and onion), sausage rolls, pasties, pork pies and quiche was made in this south Devon based factory, near Plymouth. It was a good corp citizen thing to attend the 1100 "taste panel" which was part of the quality process. Obviously Product Dev, QA and the line crews could not mark their own work s…

That was far better than I could have hoped for. Thank you. I’m trying to understand what benighted people are not fond of pork pies and pastries. Let’s have a moment of silence for them and move on.

There are always the unenlightened. One day they shall see the light (or a bloody great steak and ale pie) and they shall wipe their mouths in righteousness.

Re: Ditching Excel for Python in a legacy industry

#286
post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone who does not use Excel nice will probably make spaghetti code as well.

I'd rather reverse engineer spaghetti code than a spaghetti Excel spreadsheet.

Most probably because you do not know Excel !? But for someone who do know well Excel and understand finance concept it'd be easier to understand the spaghetti Excel spreadsheet and find where it doesn't work properly !

Re: Ditching Excel for Python in a legacy industry

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok fair enough, I only used notebooks when I can't avoid it. I'm pretty sure you don't get a repl by default though, is there an involved set up in jupyter?

jupyter console --existing should start ipython in your terminal and connect to the last started kernel (e.g., the one in the notebook you just started) https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22447572/connect-termina... For jupyter lab, you just choose to start a repl from the gui and choose an existing kernel.

Thank you! (clearly I didn't spend a lot of time doing this, as I have an Emacs addiction ;) )

Re: Ditching Excel for Python in a legacy industry

#288
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> problem #1: Environment management Great observation. Python environment management is getting simpler, but is off putting for people without a software background. Unclear even CS majors get enough classroom exposure to package & dependency management to utilize Python efficiently. I’m more optimistic about an on-prem deployment of Jupyter Notebooks or Sage Math Cloud as a way to hide a lot of the setup complexity…

Is this really an issue for the use case being described? Environment management is obviously a significant consideration for software developers who need to keep track of versions etc, but it sounds as if these users primarily want to use the fundamental numpy functions. They could install one of the scientific python stacks (e.g. anaconda) or just install packages globally with pip.

Anaconda switched its software license recently to require large companies to purchase a license, so now people must wade through the purchasing department before installation & use.

Re: Ditching Excel for Python in a legacy industry

#289
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> problem #1: Environment management Great observation. Python environment management is getting simpler, but is off putting for people without a software background. Unclear even CS majors get enough classroom exposure to package & dependency management to utilize Python efficiently. I’m more optimistic about an on-prem deployment of Jupyter Notebooks or Sage Math Cloud as a way to hide a lot of the setup complexity…

Quant here, at my firm we've deployed a JupyterHub server which provides users with a production docker image, so that analysts and portfolio managers can perform analyses without installing python, dependencies and sql drivers locally. It is working well and spurs interest in Python across the wider org - so we let everyone use it. Similar to in OP's case, I think the real selling point of Python over Excel is advan…

Thank you for sharing.
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