Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers

So it's doing a pretty good job of imitating those "experts" then too

Which experts? People who are actually experts in their field?

> except, it IS easy to learn actually. it's visual, you can click around and find out.

That's not easy at all. I am an actual Excel 2007+ virgin. I switched to OpenOffice (there was no Libreoffice yet; Oracle had not yet bought Sun) before high school. Before I finished university, I abandoned all traditional office tools in favor of open-source tools that use entirely different paradigms from Microsoft Office, e.g., Word -> Lyx/LaTeX, PowerPoint -> Org-beamer, Excel -> R. I didn't even use traditional Office tools when they were 'required' by class, instead explaining my commitments to the instructors and teaching myself the open-source alternatives as I went.

For the first ~5 years of my career, I was at startups where I didn't need to use Microsoft Office or even tools in that category.

So within the past year, I started dabbling in Excel for my job, when the last version of Excel I even messed around with was Excel 2003, pre-ribbon menu, in junior high.

And as a developer who is approaching contemporary Excel from a position that is actually pretty close to a blank slate in terms of experience with it... I am here to tell you that this

> [Excel] IS easy to learn actually

is false. You are almost certainly discounting experience people have gradually acquired with Excel in school and over the course of a career. This isn't just evident with oddball developers like me who wanted to and managed to avoid Excel for most of our careers so far. It's also perfectly evident in baby boomers who grew up without Excel and need assistance for basic tasks, and increasingly in zoomers who, like those two generations before them and earlier, have grown up without being trained on office software in schools.

Which takes us back to GP's statement:

> > Excel is powerful, but it’s not easy to learn. It only seems that way to people who already know how it works.

Moreover, these statements

> if you forget the spelling of some formula, no probs, there is a help button.

> people dont want to read manuals or consult documentation

contradict each other. So do the following two, in a slightly less direct way.

> it's visual, you can click around and find out

> they want to hit the ground running

Pressing the help button is reading the documentation, just as much as running `q --help` or whatever.

And anybody who is visually exploring a GUI with as many buttons and menus as Excel's is absolutely crawling, not running. Visually scanning an overloaded, totally new-to-you graphical interface is slow, slow, slow.

When I've been driving Excel on video calls with colleagues during working sessions (specifically for the purpose of learning it), I can practically hear the veins on their foreheads bulging as I fumble around.

Searching with your eyes, especially when some options are hidden behind additional clicks as they are on ribbon menus, is so unbelievably slow compared to searching through a comprehensive manual by typing a couple of words.

I think there must be some sort of culture gap in play here. I've been told to "google it" more times than I could ever count and not once have I perceived a condescending intent. And similarly, I have told people to google things many times and not once did I mean it to be condescending.

Usually it means "I don't know the answer off-hand, but I know that I could find it if I googled it. Therefore I'm telling you how I would find the answer." I know such advice is useful, even though everybody knows that google exists already, because most times that I was on the receiving end of this response, googling it really was the solution for me and I just needed somebody to snap their fingers in my face and remind me that I know how to find the answer myself.

"google it" is usually useful advice when I am on the receiving end of it, so I don't think it's condescending at all. Ditto "RTFM". If I turn to my coworker and ask "Hey Jimbo, what's the flag for making GNU Tar do bzip2 compression?", maybe he knows the answer off the top of his head and tells me -j, but likely he doesn't know, knows that he could find out in about 5 seconds with the manpage, and tells me to check the manpage. Which is wholly fair; we both know how to search a manpage, so why should he do that on my behalf instead of reminding me that I can look it up myself? I don't perceive any condescension here.

Level of abstraction is largely orthogonal to the GUI/CLI divide, though.

nmcli is more abstract than ip+iw+wpa_supplicant, but it's no more or less abstract than any GUI network configuration widget.

The output of ls is no more or less abstract than the contents of a directory as displayed by a GUI file manager. It's the same metaphor and the same information displayed in two different formats.