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One in five genetics papers contains errors thanks to Excel (2016)

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Re: One in five genetics papers contains errors thanks to Excel (2016)

#181

Post by dmvdoug »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #139

Know your tools. When I see such headlines, I feel sad about the state of this world and obstacles to progress, angry about the stupidity of designing all the tools for the most lazy of users, and at the same time I also laugh about the failures of proprietary software and its users, who could easily have invested a little bit of time to learn alternatives, but apparently chose not to. Yes the tooling they use might…

Yes, tools are not made for users but for the tool-builders. Everyone else must adapt!

Re: One in five genetics papers contains errors thanks to Excel (2016)

#183

Post by nhatcher »

mixedbit wrote: post #182

Does Excel have some reasonable way of unit testing of formulas?

No, as far as I know. And I have been thinking of ways to that fir the better part of the last decade. I think bringing modern programming practices into Excel might make huge differences. But I don't know how to do that in an Excel user friendly way

Re: One in five genetics papers contains errors thanks to Excel (2016)

#184

Post by Eddy_Viscosity2 »

simonh wrote: post #81
Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #56

But why oh why can't you disable automatic date reading? Put something in settings with a checkbox that I, the user, can tell excel to F-off with that nonsense. Is there anybody who can argue the 'for' case for having this on all the time without recourse?

Aside from setting all your cells to text, they have added checkboxes for this now. https://insider.microsoft365.com/en-us/blog/control-data-con...

I just tried this out. I'm using office 2021 and when I first opened excel, this setting was there just like in the link and it seemed to work when I entered a few strings in. 'Fantastic!' I thought.

Then I closed it and thought of a few other date-like strings to try and this time the option had disappeared! Every date-looking string was instantly turned into date! I tried a few other times and this setting is gone. WTF is that about?

Re: One in five genetics papers contains errors thanks to Excel (2016)

#186

Post by tsimionescu »

eviks wrote: post #178
tsimionescu wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excel formulae are absolutely a form of computation, or programming. While the caret is meant to symbolize superscript, it is nevertheless a completely different notation for exponentiation. I don't see why 0-3^2 and -3^2 need to be consistent necessarily. Sign change and subtraction are different operations, so they can have different relationships with other operators. If + worked like you want ^ to work, then -3+2…

Abacus is a form of computation, doesn't make it programming. > While the caret is meant to symbolize superscript, it is nevertheless a completely different notation for exponentiation. Wait, do you believe slash / to be a completely different notation with different rules for division? Also, it's not completely different, I've already explained that its form points to the same participle - RAISing base to the power,…

In Wolfram alpha as well, ^ is a different notation than superscripts: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=-3%5E2%2B2

And of course / is completely different from fractions too. Math notation is two-dimensional, and requires relatively few parentheses. Computer notation is uni-dimensional and requires parentheses all over the place.

This is how math notation looks like, try to write this in C/Excel/Wolfram Alpha without parens:

      2 + 2
    -3      + 4
   _____________ = 17
      2 + 3

Re: One in five genetics papers contains errors thanks to Excel (2016)

#189

Post by eviks »

tsimionescu wrote: post #186
eviks wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Abacus is a form of computation, doesn't make it programming. > While the caret is meant to symbolize superscript, it is nevertheless a completely different notation for exponentiation. Wait, do you believe slash / to be a completely different notation with different rules for division? Also, it's not completely different, I've already explained that its form points to the same participle - RAISing base to the power,…

In Wolfram alpha as well, ^ is a different notation than superscripts: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=-3%5E2%2B2 And of course / is completely different from fractions too. Math notation is two-dimensional, and requires relatively few parentheses. Computer notation is uni-dimensional and requires parentheses all over the place. This is how math notation looks like, try to write this in C/Excel/Wolfram Alpha wit…

> try to write this ... without parens:

Why? This extra condition doesn't help you, and why your link shows nothing, it behaves exactly as I'd expect, ^ is identical to superscript, you're just making an implicit mistake of thinking +2 is somehow covered by ^ and would be part of the superscript, but it wouldn't, that's a different source of ambiguity

What would help is an example where parens aren't needed, but nonetheless slash would mean something else vs horizontal line, like in the original example

That's how you show semantic "completely different"

Re: One in five genetics papers contains errors thanks to Excel (2016)

#190

Post by ozim »

AllegedAlec wrote: post #155
bvan wrote: post #78

Sounds like user-error, not a software error. Learn to use the software and its idiosyncrasies. RTFM.

God I hate programmers so much. "Hurdurdur it's not my fault. The end users are wrong. We shouldn't have to spend time creating an interface and UX that actually works as expected" Absolute fucking retards. We make tools for these people. If these tools do not work as end users would expect to that is our mistake. Stop coping about 'training end users'.

That's not programmers, that's business analysts, product owners, quality assurance, programmers only code what is asked for.

Having score set straight - not everything can be made "just do the UX that actually works" because there is more users and more "what actually works" than you can implement.

Not everything can be "just simple", excel for instance is powerful beast but it is powerful because it is complex and one can do really complex stuff with it. I can make simple spreadsheet software but no one will be using it because it will not allow to do really complex stuff.

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