71–80 of 169 posts
> Scientists rename genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates I thought they fixed that bug. Oh wait, this is Microsoft. /s
I've seen no evidence this is a bug.
Maybe it depends on your use case, but why it converts almost everything to dates ? Why not to numbers ?
As a computer scientist this sounds ridiculous. Especially that they restrict themselves to Latin letters and Arabic numbers. I guess many people here will point out that they should use other tools. I think we should help them in any way. They could also prefix every gene with Gn so it cannot be confused with other acronyms (e.g., GnDEC12). It not only breaks parsing by computers but also by humans who might read of…
I think implicit conversions is the other billion dollar mistake in computing. It just shows up as a subtle source of mistakes in so many places. JavaScript, MySQL, YAML, Excel, PHP, just to make a few off the top of my head, have all caused countless bugs and security exploits due to implicit conversations of data which can be interpreted in multiple ways, and where the system happened to pick the wrong one.
null is really another special case of the same problem - allowing a nullable type to be implicitly coerced to a nullable one, or rather a general lack of type safety.
Probably the general rule is simply, “you get more bugs when expectations don’t match reality”.
Example: 1. (null) This value can’t be null 2. (article) This value won’t be converted into a date 3. (misc) This API can be called frequently
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null is really another special case of the same problem - allowing a nullable type to be implicitly coerced to a nullable one, or rather a general lack of type safety.
I was also just thinking this… but really only realized it reading the grand-post. Probably the general rule is simply, “you get more bugs when expectations don’t match reality”. Example: 1. (null) This value can’t be null 2. (article) This value won’t be converted into a date 3. (misc) This API can be called frequently
That's too vague to be useful. You might as well say "you get bugs when you write wrong code". Whereas framing it as a lack of type safety points towards an actionable solution.
As a computer scientist this sounds ridiculous. Especially that they restrict themselves to Latin letters and Arabic numbers. I guess many people here will point out that they should use other tools. I think we should help them in any way. They could also prefix every gene with Gn so it cannot be confused with other acronyms (e.g., GnDEC12). It not only breaks parsing by computers but also by humans who might read of…
To be blunt, there are almost certainly people in this field that know more about computers than you do. They aren’t a damsel in distress.
The proposed solution is also not really a solution in that it still allows for one of the main issues: random people shouldn't be responsible for creating names for things that should have unique IDs. Which is why things like ensembl IDs exist.
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When I had this issue, the path of least resistance was to use Libre Office Calc. Of course, that's exactly the kind of application that my company now wants to remove from all systems for compliance with something called "Cyber Essentials".
You’ve answered your own question then.
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A lot of analysis is done using CSVs being pushed in and out of Excel. Doing so strips the formatting. Please understand the workflows being crying “skill issue”.
You can write CSVs in such a way that forces Excel to infer specific data types: "=""Data Here""" will always be treated as a string. This is also supported by Sheets, apparently.
As a computer scientist this sounds ridiculous. Especially that they restrict themselves to Latin letters and Arabic numbers. I guess many people here will point out that they should use other tools. I think we should help them in any way. They could also prefix every gene with Gn so it cannot be confused with other acronyms (e.g., GnDEC12). It not only breaks parsing by computers but also by humans who might read of…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but you can create a small macro to the change the formatting and assign that to your table. Your CSV should import deterministically. That's not impossible to do. I saw a complete analysis engine written as an Excel file, which accepts and exports CSVs cleanly. It can be done.
You don’t even need to write a macro. Excel’s Import Text Wizard will allow you to assign data type to each column at the time of import.