141–150 of 167 posts
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Because if I want to do a graph from some data, it's much much easier to open the csv in Excel (or LO Calc) and create a graph from a sum of the subset of three columns VS a fourth column than it use to write an SQL query.
Does Excel support SQL? Because I feel confident that Excel+SQL would 100% replace Tableau and save us a million dollars
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JSON lines has a few nice properties. The biggest advantage is that 1 line = 1 record, so you can use unix tools like head, tail, grep, sed to work on it. It's also easy to sync state in case of errors, since a newline always means record boundary. In CSV and normal JSON a record can span multiple lines,which sucks, so you almost always have to write custom code to work on them.
An S-expression file with a newline after each top-level expression has the same property. So that's not really a problem.
ingy and I came up with p3rl.org/JSONY as a "JSON with less ceremony" compromise that I often find useful (it has a PEG grammar that's a superset of JSON so pretty easy to re-implement elsewhere)
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I don't understand why people keep using CSV today while SQLite is MIT-licenced and can be used everywhere, has a very portable and lightweight implementation, has a stable file format with long-term commitment, and a good compromise on the type system that gives enough flexibility to be on par with CSV if some entries happen to have a different type...
Excel can't open SQLlite files
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I don't understand why people keep using CSV today while SQLite is MIT-licenced and can be used everywhere, has a very portable and lightweight implementation, has a stable file format with long-term commitment, and a good compromise on the type system that gives enough flexibility to be on par with CSV if some entries happen to have a different type...
Switch from the developer world to the business world and everybody has Excel to open the CSV files with the article information, the sales numbers and so on and can work with that. How do you even read data from SQLite to Excel? VBA? Some obscure connector? With CSV it's "import" or even "open file".
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Simple is beautiful, less is more.
You just move the complexity one layer up, at the composition of all those small utilities.
Out of curiosity, what would the name of the metric for measuring this tradeoff be? Average lines of code per script/program? Average scripts/programs to accomplish a given task?
I feel like it'd be really good to talk more about this tradeoff, e.g. having smart programs that do a lot but are bloated (OpenVPN, OpenSSL, Docker all come to mind) versus smaller programs that do less, but chain together (most GNU tools with the piping mechanism) and the extreme ends of this scale.
Yet, i don't even know how much research has been done into this, what the status quo is and what terms to even look up. It's like talking about the difference between a monolith application or a microservices application, an abstraction that would be applied to tasks and the ways to do them, much like we have SLoC or cyclomatic complexity in regards to reasoning about code (though neither is exactly perfect either).
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Simple is beautiful, less is more.
You just move the complexity one layer up, at the composition of all those small utilities.
Debugging complexity is reduced also because if something causes an abnormal termination, only the containing utility will die, not the entire composition.
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In what way? I recognize that the remarks Terry A. Davis made were not his fault, it's the mental illness. Doesn't change the fact that he had an unfortunate fixation on race. I wish his terrible fate could have been avoided, but having been very close for many years to a schizophrenic person, I can tell you that they will only get treatment if they want to. You can't force them. You can try to be there and help them…
> In what way? I recognize that the remarks Terry A. Davis made were not his fault, it's the mental illness. I don't think mental illness really changes whether or not you have a good heart. I've met many people dealing with mental illness who are gracious and compassionate to all people no matter their race. Though it's possible his views might have been informed by his upbringing or his environment. Perhaps mental…
Late edit: racism can't be said to be the fault of mental illness
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Does Excel support SQL? Because I feel confident that Excel+SQL would 100% replace Tableau and save us a million dollars
You have been able to include the results of sql queries in excel for decades.
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You just move the complexity one layer up, at the composition of all those small utilities.
That is false. When a small utility terminates, I'm assured that any file descriptors which it opened are closed, that any memory it allocated is gone, and that it didn't touch any data structures of the adjacent programs I'm composing it with. That's a whole lot of complexity that didn't move to the next layer. Debugging complexity is reduced also because if something causes an abnormal termination, only the contain…
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You just move the complexity one layer up, at the composition of all those small utilities.
> You just move the complexity one layer up, at the composition of all those small utilities. Out of curiosity, what would the name of the metric for measuring this tradeoff be? Average lines of code per script/program? Average scripts/programs to accomplish a given task? I feel like it'd be really good to talk more about this tradeoff, e.g. having smart programs that do a lot but are bloated (OpenVPN, OpenSSL, Docke…
Composeability requires many different interfaces, but not every solution needs composeability.