Wow. How far will vim go if it can now replicate like excel?
Excel.vim
61–65 of 65 posts
Re: Excel.vim
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Interesting definition of broken. Consider this: A medical device that people's lives depend on. It only fails in 1/1000 cases causing death. Many people could state, "it works for me, can't be broken!" On the other hand, the families of the dead could argue that it is broken. Who is right? Obviously this isn't such an extreme case. No one has their life depending on a Vim plugin, but it illustrates a point. "Works…
I think the point is that for many people building free software for fun, "works for me" is all that matters. Testing use cases that you know you will never encounter is not interesting or challenging (at least in this case), but it takes time, and you're not making a product, nobody is relying on you. Why bother? The author of this plugin isn't trying to make a spreadsheet competitor, they just released it publicly…
I think that we can still consider it broken without demanding that the author 'do it better.' People make broken things all of the time.
Re: Excel.vim
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the point is that for many people building free software for fun, "works for me" is all that matters. Testing use cases that you know you will never encounter is not interesting or challenging (at least in this case), but it takes time, and you're not making a product, nobody is relying on you. Why bother? The author of this plugin isn't trying to make a spreadsheet competitor, they just released it publicly…
I think that we can still consider it broken without demanding that the author 'do it better.' People make broken things all of the time.
We can consider it incomplete, or disagree with the design choices, but broken means it doesn't do what it's supposed to do. Here, it does everything the author intended it to do, and everything the description says it does. When you say it's broken, it sounds at least to me like you're imposing your own requirements on a project you have nothing to do with. It's like calling Microsoft Office broken because it can't handle Open Office files. It's not broken, it just doesn't have all the features you would have included.
Re: Excel.vim
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Interesting definition of broken. Consider this: A medical device that people's lives depend on. It only fails in 1/1000 cases causing death. Many people could state, "it works for me, can't be broken!" On the other hand, the families of the dead could argue that it is broken. Who is right? Obviously this isn't such an extreme case. No one has their life depending on a Vim plugin, but it illustrates a point. "Works…
I think the point is that for many people building free software for fun, "works for me" is all that matters. Testing use cases that you know you will never encounter is not interesting or challenging (at least in this case), but it takes time, and you're not making a product, nobody is relying on you. Why bother? The author of this plugin isn't trying to make a spreadsheet competitor, they just released it publicly…
It's totally cool to release some software that has some bugs. It's also sad to program in an environment that isn't Unicode-friendly.
Re: Excel.vim
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Okay... let's go into this... how are the strings in excel encoded anyway? I'd be willing to bet money that at least some of the formats in question aren't UTF-8, they are likely ASCII encoded against a character set or code page. Then you have to read that codepage, and convert the necessary characters to their Unicode equivalents, and from there do you downcode to utf-8? Does the language this library is written in…
> how are the strings in excel encoded anyway? Length-prefixed byte arrays encoded using various code pages. There are a small number that excel uses: https://github.com/SheetJS/js-codepage/blob/master/excel.csv (the columns are CP#, mapping, single/double-byte) > Does the language this library is written in support that translation? Are there modules to do that? Is the license for those module(s) necessary compatibl…
> If we can put together an Apache2-licensed module in JS in an afternoon (https://github.com/SheetJS/js-codepage) it can be done in python.
I thought Python 2 was Unicode-unfriendly. So not as easy as JS.