41–50 of 435 posts
From that perspective WSJ is doing a great job in making the bed for these ideas: startups will eventually want to sell to those "Finance Chiefs" which is never an easy job.
I’m not a mechanic, but is WD40 an example? Or maybe some tool like a hand held circular saw, in home construction?
And, other examples from the tech world?
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I've been working on a spreadsheet which is more amenable to embedding in programs (compiling to an IR which can be translated to high level languages or [eventually] compiler IRs like those of LLVM or GCC). I worked at a company where months were spent recreating models from a spreadsheet produced by subject matter experts, and this was a major cost. A spreadsheet optimized for integration into software build proces…
This idea looks super interesting. Is the source already online, or will be?
This article seems to typify what PG was talking about in his submarine article [1]. [1] - www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
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>Excel is fine for the home user. But the implicit conversions of input data can play havoc with any complex analysis. Can you not turn all of that off (and only need to turn it off once per sheet/file)?
Tell that to tens of thousands of researchers. Heck, even integration has been re-discovered and published: https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-research... If the tool doesn't work correctly by default . Then it's likely the wrong tool for the job. The default conversions are fine for 99% of use-cases. But no one should mistake Excel for a robust data analysis tool.
I would be worried about endless forking of defaults as a feature of newly built tools, leading to a bunch of new tools that will be harder to maintain.
If they can't manage implicit data casting preferences (if those exist, they may not), surely handing them something more complicated like R, MATLAB, or SQL is even worse.
How much does it cost to get an advertisement like this in the WSJ?
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This idea looks super interesting. Is the source already online, or will be?
Will be, "soon". It turns out it's difficult to get the basics of a spreadsheet right. I made the mistake of trying to use an existing spreadsheet application (like LibreOffice Calc or Excel) as the source format early on.
That is literally all I did when I was a financial analyst and is how I became a programmer. This should be automatic, I thought.