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

Spreadsheets Are Hot–and Cranking Out Complex Code

wired.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 142 posts

Re: Spreadsheets Are Hot–and Cranking Out Complex Code

#71

Post by civilized »

catgary wrote: post #70
civilized wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a colleague who is a PhD in Applied Math. Pretty bright guy, huge Python/Jupyter lover with many years of experience. Loves to use git, loves to write dozens of unit tests. A true Man of the Future, according to Excel haters. He wrote some Python to solve some mildly complex business problem. I told him to translate it into Excel for stakeholders. He did, and the answer came out completely different. It turned…

That is hardly special to Python->Excel translation, and happens any time someone reimplements a piece of software.

I think Excel has something to do with it. In Excel, you're usually forced to do computations in small steps and look at the intermediate results. In traditional coding, you don't see anything but the final result (unless you ask to see it). It's much easier to assume everything is working as intended when it's not.

Excel has its problems too. Different tools for different jobs. Tech boosters need to understand this and not just cynically assume that spreadsheet lovers are old fogeys who are afraid of their jobs being automated away.

Re: Spreadsheets Are Hot–and Cranking Out Complex Code

#72

Post by phkx »

What do are you using spreadsheets for privately? I never dig deep into their capabilities, so I mostly use them to track expenses within some particular scope, e.g. healthcare. When I recently wanted to compare several loans and estimate our financial situation several years in the future, I wrote some Python code and used a Jupyter notebook to enter parameters and make plots. Has any of you done something similar using spreadsheets?

On a side note: I didn’t find a Python library for time series generation (not analysis). Something where you can build some models (e.g. loan, income, expenses) which depend on a common parameter (time) and then evaluate all your models for different values of the common parameter. Right now, I generate pandas series/dataframes and combine them afterwards, which also took some massaging of pandas (which I also usually don‘t use a lot).

Re: Spreadsheets Are Hot–and Cranking Out Complex Code

#73

Post by lupire »

nerdponx wrote: post #32
motohagiography wrote: post #31

I've learned products designed to replace spreadsheets have a huge hurdle because the people who use spreadsheets treat operating the sheet as their job. Replacing them removes their autonomy and control over an information process, and subsumes the value they bring to their employers - so they will resist products that threaten that. Excel is a complete management subculture. The other advice I give is if you are ge…

It's not about autonomy in an abstract sense. It's the fact that regular people can customize, hack, modify, automate, and otherwise program the spreadsheet. Data analysts and managers are more than trained monkeys; they actually need to do those kinds of things (at least sometimes) in order to do their jobs. I agree that the ideal world is one where you can connect the spreadsheets to other data sources, so you get…

ODBC is decades old

Re: Spreadsheets Are Hot–and Cranking Out Complex Code

#74

Post by rbonvall »

motohagiography wrote: post #31

I've learned products designed to replace spreadsheets have a huge hurdle because the people who use spreadsheets treat operating the sheet as their job. Replacing them removes their autonomy and control over an information process, and subsumes the value they bring to their employers - so they will resist products that threaten that. Excel is a complete management subculture. The other advice I give is if you are ge…

In my experience, just offering the ability to export to and import from Excel workbooks goes a long way in winning the spreadsheet-loving crowd.

Re: Spreadsheets Are Hot–and Cranking Out Complex Code

#75

Post by kzrdude »

segmondy wrote: post #10
narush wrote: post #6

Warning: I'm a founder working in the spreadsheet space, so take the rest of my this comment with a (large) grain of salt. I've written before [1] (HN and elsewhere) about how I think spreadsheets are the most popular programming paradigm ever, we just don't talk about it much. As this article mentions, there are many ways we can push this forward. I personally think the most powerful low-code spreadsheet tools we ca…

Just curious, why as a Linux user shouldn't I use Libreoffice calc with python? Why bring in something so proprietary?

Seemlessly integrating spreadsheets into jupyter sounds like the holy grail to me. I haven't tried it yet, though.

I think their users are people like me - who work a lot in Jupyter and swear by it - in a Python data analysis/visualisation environment. To bring in the best of spreadsheets into that could be magical. To just work in libreoffice calc or Excel would be a nonstarter, it just doesn't match all the other python tools in the workflow.

Re: Spreadsheets Are Hot–and Cranking Out Complex Code

#76

Post by willhslade »

maxerickson wrote: post #9
buescher wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft Access is, of course, still around. It would be great if there were a solid way to develop a database, forms, and reports in Access and then deploy it to the web. If you've ever had to work with someone else's Access database, it is unusual to see a reasonably normalized relational database. Most people are much more comfortable with the single flat file of Sharepoint lists.

For stuff at the scale of a small Access database, does the normalization (or lack of) end up being a big deal? I get that there are real advantages, I'm just wondering out loud whether they are universally applicable/important to small scale databases.

Speaking as someone with direct experience maintaining Access databases that should have been SQL Server from inception, yes it absolutely does. If you need to force feed 10+GB through Access artificial 2GB constraint and your programming language (VBA) is both single threaded and interpreted, if you aren't clever then you will run into performance problems, just as you would if you were doing something similar in Javascript or Python + SQLite.

Re: Spreadsheets Are Hot–and Cranking Out Complex Code

#77

Post by catgary »

civilized wrote: post #71
catgary wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is hardly special to Python->Excel translation, and happens any time someone reimplements a piece of software.

I think Excel has something to do with it. In Excel, you're usually forced to do computations in small steps and look at the intermediate results. In traditional coding, you don't see anything but the final result (unless you ask to see it). It's much easier to assume everything is working as intended when it's not. Excel has its problems too. Different tools for different jobs. Tech boosters need to understand this…

I think you’re just describing poor coding practices

Re: Spreadsheets Are Hot–and Cranking Out Complex Code

#78

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

mch82 wrote: post #47
wildrhythms wrote: post #2

Every day I think about how Microsoft Access allowed otherwise not-so-tech-savvy users to, with just a little training and practice, build a complete relational database for their entire business, supported by a relatively sane GUI and a way to build forms and reports with very little (if any) 'code'. I have no idea what small companies are using nowadays, but I think there has to be some untapped middle ground somew…

Claris Works on Macs in the 1990s is the best database product I’ve ever used. It was amazingly user friendly. I used it to make form letters & reports. Claris Works prioritized the application layer of the database and hid a lot of the complexity at the data layer. DB Browser for SQLite is the coolest database product I’ve used recently. Similar to Mito, DB Browser generates SQL into a log as operations are performe…

> I need to find a good GUI authoring layer for SQLite

MS Access with an ODBC connector.

Re: Spreadsheets Are Hot–and Cranking Out Complex Code

#79

Post by LukeEF »

Founder of excel collaboration and versioning startup [1] here so I am a believer.

There are only about 30 million programmers. There are over 1 billion Excel users. Excel is Turing complete. Excel is by far the most used programming language on the planet. It is easily 20 times more popular than the next contender.

The value of Excel is that it is presenting the data, with a set of formulae that let you keep derived data up-to-date. This inferred data provides sums and computations, sometimes simple, but sometimes exquisitely complex. And through this whole range of complexity, with a billion users, virtually nobody treats Excel seriously like a programming language.

We have a programming language which is essentially acting as a declarative database, and yet we don't do unit tests, we don't keep track of changes, we collaborate with Excel by sending it to our colleagues in the mail and god-forbid we should doing any serious linting of what is in the thing.

Anyone who has used Excel in anger realizes why it is so brilliant. Show me another declarative constraint based, data driven inference language that I can teach to my grandmother.

The problem isn't Excel. The problem is that we are treating Excel like its a word processor, and not what it is: a programming language.

[1] https://versionxl.com/

Re: Spreadsheets Are Hot–and Cranking Out Complex Code

#80

Post by syshum »

motohagiography wrote: post #31

I've learned products designed to replace spreadsheets have a huge hurdle because the people who use spreadsheets treat operating the sheet as their job. Replacing them removes their autonomy and control over an information process, and subsumes the value they bring to their employers - so they will resist products that threaten that. Excel is a complete management subculture. The other advice I give is if you are ge…

To replace spreadsheets, you have to eliminate the roles (jobs) that create the spreadsheets. Automation and proper BI can do both....
Post reply on HN