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Spreadsheets Are Hot–and Cranking Out Complex Code

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Re: Spreadsheets Are Hot–and Cranking Out Complex Code

#81

Post by syshum »

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…

This is a double edge sword, because often time there is no one validing the results of the spread sheets...

"The number looks ok" is not a good validation, and there has been some very public data errors as a result of bad spreadsheets.

I often wondered if in the average business is even 10% of the spreadsheets where actually audited what would happen.... I suspect the results would be rather shocking

Re: Spreadsheets Are Hot–and Cranking Out Complex Code

#82

Post by dkersten »

catgary wrote: post #77
civilized wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Certainly if you do traditional TDD or something like REPL-driven development, you see the intermediate results and validate the correctness of your code as you go.

Re: Spreadsheets Are Hot–and Cranking Out Complex Code

#83

Post by m_mueller »

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…

Power Query / Power BI is pretty much that, treating spreadsheets as one source among others, with transformations and analytics on top.

Re: Spreadsheets Are Hot–and Cranking Out Complex Code

#84

Post by rr808 »

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…

> 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.

Spreadsheets are better because as you say the owner is their job to maintain it. If you replace with an IT process the new "owner" is likely a below-average developer that probably is uninterested in the business. A few years down the road the usefulness of the replacement will suffer.

Re: Spreadsheets Are Hot–and Cranking Out Complex Code

#85

Post by civilized »

dkersten wrote: post #82
catgary wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’re just describing poor coding practices

Certainly if you do traditional TDD or something like REPL-driven development, you see the intermediate results and validate the correctness of your code as you go.

Those are great! But they are coding disciplines one must choose to follow, and continue following every step of the way. You aren't inherently following them because that's how the tool works. Sometimes the tool-enforced discipline has advantages.

Re: Spreadsheets Are Hot–and Cranking Out Complex Code

#86

Post by janci »

Excel is great and versatile, yet lacks some critical features.

- It's easy to load data from database or API without VBA, yet impossible to write updates back without VBA. With VBA it's still messy string concatenation of SQL queries.

- VBA is security nightmare

- Version control is bad. Distributing spreadsheets in emails and collecting changes back is nightmare. Sharing a file on network drive lacks fine-grained permission control.

- It's hard to maintain proper normalized relational data model. It's impossible to abstract the normalized model from the user (i.e. show labels in selectboxes but store ID's)

- It's locale dependent. Date formatting, column separator (comma/semicolon separated), even function names. Unusable in international data exchange.

- It mixes formatting, logic and data. Impossible to make reusable blocks. New lambda functions help somewhat.

And so much more.

Re: Spreadsheets Are Hot–and Cranking Out Complex Code

#87

Post by recuter »

nunb wrote: post #46

All this and not one mention of DabbleDB !! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCVj5RZOqwY https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=102

Well it disappeared over a decade ago. Very interesting demo. Time is a flat circle I guess. Nothing actually comes to mind from the present that is quite like this, hmm.

Hmm.

Re: Spreadsheets Are Hot–and Cranking Out Complex Code

#88

Post by lph »

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…

Mito looks very cool! Looking forward to trying it.

The blending of spreadsheets and notebooks seems inevitable. One trend notebook-as-program. I've heard several variations of this: "The data scientists give us a notebook, and our automation runs the notebook to do on ". It's clunky to use a format initially intended for interactive visual use for headless automation, but there's a practical wisdom to sticking with whatever format the data scientists prefer. Twenty years ago, I saw the same sort of thing with engineers and spreadsheets.

The one thing notebooks lose, though, is data flow computing. That's a major strength of spreadsheets, and the imperative execution of notebook cells seems like a step backwards. Although I'm sure somebody has bolted some kind of inter-cell dependency execution onto Jupyter by this point.

Re: Spreadsheets Are Hot–and Cranking Out Complex Code

#89

Post by fivea »

rr808 wrote: post #84
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…

> 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. Spreadsheets are better because as you…

> Spreadsheets are better because as you say the owner is their job to maintain it. If you replace with an IT process the new "owner" is likely a below-average developer that probably is uninterested in the business.

I disagree. Spreadsheets are incomparably worse because what you charitably described as "the owner is their job to maintain it" in real life it's reflected as having a single employee who abused a first-move advantage to monopolize and excerpt unduly control over, and even hijack, key operation areas.

We all heard horror stories of how employees screwed over their former bosses because only they had control over things like key spreadsheets. Advocating for spreadsheets is advocating for these vulnerabilities.

Re: Spreadsheets Are Hot–and Cranking Out Complex Code

#90

Post by zarzavat »

rco8786 wrote: post #57
_the_inflator wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the people who use spreadsheets treat operating the sheet as their job Yes, observed the same. And "The new tool is faster and more reliable!" does not help either. They got their workflow and cope with it - for years. Only time people adopted new tools - banking - when they could deliver their assignments way faster to their superiors. Personal advantages must be spotted.

To be fair, I don’t think it’s coping. Spreadsheets are malleable by design. Being able to modify how it functions on the fly is an enormous power for these users. And the better/faster/smarter SaaS replacement is also extremely rigid and inflexible. So while it works to replace the current version of their god spreadsheet, it can’t adjust on the fly as the user’s needs change like the spreadsheet can. I’m convinced…

Truly Excel could be improved in a vast number of ways. But would anyone use it? Excel is a kind of product that is perfectly understandable to the average business person.

The more complicated you make it, the more it becomes like real software development. And that is a skill that most people don’t possess.

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