Previously discussed (621 comments):
Scientists rename genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates (2020)
11–20 of 169 posts
Re: Scientists rename genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates (2020)
#12So let me get this straight: Scientists would rather rename genes, than to simply use a tool other than MS Excel?
> So let me get this straight: Scientists would rather rename genes, than to simply use a tool other than MS Excel? It's not that they'd rather. They understand that a trillion dollar corporation cannot supply the most basic tool they need for work, despite trying for 40 years. They just can't effect change. The real problem behind it all is that they allow themselves to be bullied. Despite holding multiple PhDs they…
An enjoyable read!
I’d guess that this is becoming less and less common, it pretty much sums up the places I worked at during the late 90’s but mot so much anymore.
Re: Scientists rename genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates (2020)
#13As a computer scientist this sounds ridiculous. Especially that they restrict themselves to Latin letters and Arabic numbers. I guess many people here will point out that they should use other tools. I think we should help them in any way. They could also prefix every gene with Gn so it cannot be confused with other acronyms (e.g., GnDEC12). It not only breaks parsing by computers but also by humans who might read of…
> Especially that they restrict themselves to Latin letters and Arabic numbers.
I think this is sensible actually. Certainly better than the inverse, Latin numbers and Arabic letters. I'm not sure why they put it in this way (with the ethnic reference), but they are really just saying about putting it letters and numbers that people use and would be able to spell out to each other.
I think your idea of a prefix though is great - simple.
Re: Scientists rename genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates (2020)
#14So let me get this straight: Scientists would rather rename genes, than to simply use a tool other than MS Excel?
> So let me get this straight: Scientists would rather rename genes, than to simply use a tool other than MS Excel? It's not that they'd rather. They understand that a trillion dollar corporation cannot supply the most basic tool they need for work, despite trying for 40 years. They just can't effect change. The real problem behind it all is that they allow themselves to be bullied. Despite holding multiple PhDs they…
> a trillion dollar corporation cannot supply the most basic tool they need for work
Same - I'm still waiting for Microsoft to make me a decent set of drill bits. Can't believe a trillion dollar corporation cannot supply the most basic tool I need for work!
Re: Scientists rename genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates (2020)
#15I think implicit conversions is the other billion dollar mistake in computing. It just shows up as a subtle source of mistakes in so many places. JavaScript, MySQL, YAML, Excel, PHP, just to make a few off the top of my head, have all caused countless bugs and security exploits due to implicit conversations of data which can be interpreted in multiple ways, and where the system happened to pick the wrong one.
null is really another special case of the same problem - allowing a nullable type to be implicitly coerced to a nullable one, or rather a general lack of type safety.
Re: Scientists rename genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates (2020)
#16So let me get this straight: Scientists would rather rename genes, than to simply use a tool other than MS Excel?
That presumes that they don't like the situation.
Perhaps there is a minority who thinks that automatic data conversion is unsound, and a majority who thinks it's 'pragmatic', and will let them move faster.
Re: Scientists rename genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates (2020)
#17I think implicit conversions is the other billion dollar mistake in computing. It just shows up as a subtle source of mistakes in so many places. JavaScript, MySQL, YAML, Excel, PHP, just to make a few off the top of my head, have all caused countless bugs and security exploits due to implicit conversations of data which can be interpreted in multiple ways, and where the system happened to pick the wrong one.
A billion dollars isn't really that much money. You see billion dollar mistakes all the time at big companied
Re: Scientists rename genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates (2020)
#18Or they could set the format of the column to text instead of keeping it as general and everything would just work.
If these "scientists" are having this problem then they haven't spent any time at all learning how to use the tool they rely on.
Can we trust anything these people produce if this is the level of competence they have with Excel?
Re: Scientists rename genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates (2020)
#19As a computer scientist this sounds ridiculous. Especially that they restrict themselves to Latin letters and Arabic numbers. I guess many people here will point out that they should use other tools. I think we should help them in any way. They could also prefix every gene with Gn so it cannot be confused with other acronyms (e.g., GnDEC12). It not only breaks parsing by computers but also by humans who might read of…
Gene names are potentially mentioned a lot in a paper, a prefix would be seriously annoying for reading. And which other characters would you want to use here in the names, a restriction to the latin alphabet and numbers seems very reasonable to me?
Re: Scientists rename genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates (2020)
#20So let me get this straight: Scientists would rather rename genes, than to simply use a tool other than MS Excel?
A lot of scientists are very bright people that can't invest the time to learn another tool that maybe is worse than Excel (e.g. Google Docs also does the gene-to-date swapping, try writting "SEPT2", the known gene [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEPT2] in a cell), investing time and effort in changing pipelines that work for them.
Instead, the path of least resistance is to change the name of all known genes that cause problems with Excel. Biologist are changing and adding names all the time, so it's not like this is new. E.g. https://www.uniprot.org/uniprotkb/Q04609/entry#names_and_tax... shows you a gene with 5 names.