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Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates

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Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates

#301

Post by MaxBarraclough »

alphanumeric0 wrote: post #294

Research software dev here. This came as a huge shock to me when I started at my job. I work with very smart, dedicated people performing cancer research, why would they put up with this affecting their productivity? Humans really are adaptable creatures. After a few months of working there my boss handed me 3 or 4 Excel spreadsheets to compare to ensure a recent change I made hadn't affected our data (we don't have…

Were the files expected to be identical? If so, diff would have done the job.

Perhaps not directly relevant, but the lesser known GNU Recutils looks neat. Perhaps some day I'll find an opportunity to try it out.

https://www.gnu.org/software/recutils/manual/recutils.html#I...

Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates

#302

Post by teruakohatu »

alphanumeric0 wrote: post #294

Research software dev here. This came as a huge shock to me when I started at my job. I work with very smart, dedicated people performing cancer research, why would they put up with this affecting their productivity? Humans really are adaptable creatures. After a few months of working there my boss handed me 3 or 4 Excel spreadsheets to compare to ensure a recent change I made hadn't affected our data (we don't have…

Have you checked out the tidyverse suite of packages on R? The tidyverse philosophy is don't make assumptions about data so you get detailed error messages when one row probably was not parsed correctly.

Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates

#304

Post by cpeterso »

dragonwriter wrote: post #287
otherme123 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then we are doomed to the lowest denominator. The bad actor here is the one that expects some software to magically change your data, and he should expect an error or at least a warning or asking for confirmation. To good actor is people who carefully care and curate their data, just to be corrupted silently by the program. Lets say then, keep the default but add at least some sort of "respect my data as it is, becau…

> Lets say then, keep the default but add at least some sort of "respect my data as it is, because this is a CSV with CSV extension" mode. CSV doesn't have really data types (or even a hard and fast standard), so that doesn't really work. OTOH, Excel lets you specify data handling by column when importing from untyped text-based formats like CSV, which you should probably do if you care. Or you should write up a stan…

> CSV-like format with explicit semantics around data types

You could encode the column names in row 1 and column types in row 2. JavaScript type names would be convenient for most CRUD work, but SQL type names might be more appropriate for more complicated data.

Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates

#305

Post by tqi »

mcv wrote: post #162

> "Why, exactly, in a fight between Microsoft and the entire genetics community, was it the scientists who had to back down?" Back down? Or pick a better tool. If Excel proves to be an unreliable tool for your job, use a better one. Alternatives exist, ranging from Google Docs, and LibreOffice, to simpler light-weight spreadsheets. Or possibly more specialist tools. Why does everything always have to be put in Excel…

Characterizing this as a "fight between Microsoft and the entire genetics community" is... a choice. But I guess Tech is this season's "big bad", so every subplot has to tie back.

Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates

#307

Post by brummm »

spuz wrote: post #124
owl57 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't even know why anyone still uses this notation in today's connected world. 2020-08-06 is ideal. Russian standard (06.08.2020) is uglier (digits are not sorted by significance) but still unambiguous. But that slash horror? Why would anyone continue inflicting this on themselves and their peers!?

How is "06.08.2020" unambiguous?

It's unambiguous for everybody except Americans with their weird switching.

Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates

#308

Post by rolph »

vikramkr wrote: post #203

A lot of people are attacking excel in this thread, just remember to give a fair share of the blame to people naming genes as well. These are meaningless names and changing them is frankly easier than changing a feature in excel (that the finance folk probably don't want changed). And its a good excuse to clear up some of the egregiously silly disease related names as well so we don't tell parents their kid is suffer…

no these are not meaningless names, there is undue confusication in the case of the more contemporary names such as [Sonichedgehog]

these are not meaningless lables https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_hedgehog

mentioned eslewhere in this thread is a nomenclature that allows one to easily find notes referring to the gene from your research library. It was a new cadre of young upcoming scientists that decided to break with tradition and use something familiar to lable genes according to game characters or pop icons.

Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates

#309

Post by bromuro »

jordigh wrote: post #7

To people asking, "why do they use Excel?" that's like asking "why must we be subjected to gravity?" The whole world's data ultimately comes from or ends up in an Excel spreadsheet. Sure, we might use other intermediate data storage methods, but in the end it's going to go into some scientist's or some politician's computer, and by golly it's gonna be in Excel. Trying to rally against Excel is like trying to rally ag…

> to people asking, "why do they use Excel?"

I often read comments on HN starting with “to people asking” or “to the people wondering”... and introducing a new discussion, usually on another similar topic, basically hijacking the whole discussion.

Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates

#310

Post by t-writescode »

3pt14159 wrote: post #157
takluyver wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, there are few things programmers don't complain about. But YAML still seems to be very popular as a configuration format for new tools, e.g. CI services.

I wish everyone would just switch to TOML. It's sane and readable.

Or json!!! Why did we leave json???
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