Been thinking about someone's observation that one of the reasons so many people do so much in Excel is that it's actually a *phenomenally* observable programming system and lets people do things they otherwise couldn't.
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Been thinking about someone's observation that one of the reasons so many people do so much in Excel is that it's actually a *phenomenally* observable programming system and lets people do things they otherwise couldn't.
I think, on much reflection, that this is 100% true. A lot of the bad things that people do in Excel are due to its lack of support for doing things better, but the observability? Top tier, with the next few tiers underneath it completely empty.
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Been thinking about someone's observation that one of the reasons so many people do so much in Excel is that it's actually a *phenomenally* observable programming system and lets people do things they otherwise couldn't.
I think, on much reflection, that this is 100% true. A lot of the bad things that people do in Excel are due to its lack of support for doing things better, but the observability? Top tier, with the next few tiers underneath it completely empty.
@wordshaper As a counterpoint, I went to a talk in grad school on finding errors in spreadsheets. They claimed that the average spreadsheet has a surprisingly high number of errors in it. Once an error exists, they can be very hard to find since everything just looks like rows and columns of words and numbers. Moreover, it's very easy to propagate the errors throughout the rest of your spreadsheet.
This is why getting LLMs to create spreadsheets for you seems like a really bad idea. Sure, they might look fancy, but they've been trained on spreadsheets which likely have lots of bugs. And you know that most people aren't going to check every single formula to make sure they're correct.
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@wordshaper As a counterpoint, I went to a talk in grad school on finding errors in spreadsheets. They claimed that the average spreadsheet has a surprisingly high number of errors in it. Once an error exists, they can be very hard to find since everything just looks like rows and columns of words and numbers. Moreover, it's very easy to propagate the errors throughout the rest of your spreadsheet.
This is why getting LLMs to create spreadsheets for you seems like a really bad idea. Sure, they might look fancy, but they've been trained on spreadsheets which likely have lots of bugs. And you know that most people aren't going to check every single formula to make sure they're correct.
@waltman Oh, absolutely, spreadsheets are a *mess* and people screw them up all the time! That's one of the places where spreadsheets fail people -- they're programmable (yay-ish), and observable (yay!), but lack basically all the testing and debugging tools that other programming environments have and the result is an enthusiastic mess.
I wouldn't want to to use a spreadsheet-style UI as the observable interface for a programming system, just noting that its doing something fairly unique.
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@waltman Oh, absolutely, spreadsheets are a *mess* and people screw them up all the time! That's one of the places where spreadsheets fail people -- they're programmable (yay-ish), and observable (yay!), but lack basically all the testing and debugging tools that other programming environments have and the result is an enthusiastic mess.
I wouldn't want to to use a spreadsheet-style UI as the observable interface for a programming system, just noting that its doing something fairly unique.
@wordshaper Also they're the one piece of tech that corporate staff could use without the involvement and hassles of working with IT, so it's not surprising they've been used creatively for all sorts of tasks.
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@wordshaper Also they're the one piece of tech that corporate staff could use without the involvement and hassles of working with IT, so it's not surprising they've been used creatively for all sorts of tasks.
@waltman @wordshaper what I was about to add - its a tool that your users actually *have*.
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