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What we really wish for is a modern replacement for MS Access
modern in what way?
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/68034271/how-can-i-get-t...
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I think one of the main problem with databases is how do you populate them. I wish there were simple-as-Excel frontends for databases where a normal user could input his data like in preformated Excel table without having to deal with the database mechanics.
Microsoft Access?
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I think one of the main problem with databases is how do you populate them. I wish there were simple-as-Excel frontends for databases where a normal user could input his data like in preformated Excel table without having to deal with the database mechanics.
MS Access can be directly linked to a spreadsheet for upload / download, or you can copy and paste data directly or import data files. Other databases (MySQL) also allow for import of CSV data.
'000s of rows of data in a spreadsheet - sigh. But say 'database' to some people and they hear 'The Devil'. Excel is a glorious tool which welcomes all, the savvy and the unskilled but imaginative newbies alike. There is something about all those little cells that presents an itch everyone wants to scratch, and you just know that for some that scratching is going to produce something akin to a spreadsheet version of…
I think one of the main problem with databases is how do you populate them. I wish there were simple-as-Excel frontends for databases where a normal user could input his data like in preformated Excel table without having to deal with the database mechanics.
Fantastic blog post. I highly recommend reading it in full, and also checking out the work of the European Spreadsheet Risks Group, and Felienne Hermans specifically (referenced in the original post). I've been working on a spreadsheet startup [1] for the past 8 months or so and those folks have a large amount of absolutely upsetting-but-helpful research on spreadsheet usage/errors. After the past few years working w…
I don't know why we think the user is some child and try to abstract away any and all complexity from their job, which ends up leading to some proprietary solution with huge inefficiencies somewhere compared to a flat file and a script in python or R. Software like excel is often seen as a way to do stuff you could do in R but without having to write code. Imo that thinking is wrong because it makes this assumption t…
I think a paradox of programming is that we know it's easy, yet we also know that a certain fraction of people -- perhaps a majority -- will never grasp how to do it effectively. And the ones who can do it well enough to get paid for it, aren't sticking around in low paying administrative jobs.
And coding well enough to really replace a spreadsheet without making something even worse is yet a higher level of programming skill.
Given the virtually ubiquitous knowledge that programming skill is of market value, I think the existing proportion of people who can program is indicative of how many people are potentially capable of it. I don't know a single manager or engineer who doesn't think that learning a little bit of Python would be useful.
I think I big mistake people make here is that they think they are far better at everything on a computer than a non-programmer. They don't realize how much you can do in Excel and how much they suck at it. If you can't use it without a mouse and/or if you don't know pivot tables, you are just as much of a beginner as a C++ programmer who doesn't know what a pointer is. It's only after trying to convert an excel shee…
Excel is the most widely used programming environment on earth because it is so good at it. That said, I think the fact that we haven't made anything better speaks to the change in philosophy our industry has undergone, from one where we wanted to enable users with computing to one where we want to herd and farm them for money.
[0] yes, both 'sophisticated' and 'application' are defined pretty loosely here.
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modern in what way?
Written in javascript
The thing that's always baffled me about Excel is why you must always work in "minified" mode when composing formulas. It seems like just adding the ability to spread a calculation out over multiple lines and add some indentation would make the bugs everyone complains about go down by... a lot.
No, it wouldn’t. Case in point: Excel has ability to spread a calculation over multiple lines, but the bugs are not down. In fact, people who are aware of Alt-enter produce buggier code: they end up writing longer formulas, with fewer intermediate results displayed, and have less visibility of the functioning of their spreadsheets. Write simpler formulas.
Excel's formula language seems deliberately designed to prevent that.
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Maximum number of columns is 16 384 (in modern Excel). PostreSQL has a limit of 16 000. So Excel > PostrGRE? :) I wonder what kind of data did you use and why it had to be stored in so many columns. This approach would probably kill a "real" database too.
Oops I definitely got it wrong. Probably a bit more than a thousand columns now that I think about it. Still a beast. The thing is a database with every column a product id.
I strongly doubt there is any other reactive programming environment that is easier to teach to novices than a spreadsheet. One wonders what would happen if you could extend lisp to do reactive programming, and then extend it a bit further to load an excel workbook into an abstract syntax tree.