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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   35663 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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like the median or matrix multiplication (without resorting to purpose-built functions)

Both of these are trivial to implement in Excel if you know what they are (without using the builtin functions, which seems... kind of dumb? like, do you implement lists from bare metal in python?) -- which granted most business users do not, but that doesn't make excel worse than a real language at these things.

If you think of it as a functional language in which you can see the value of every variable all the time, it becomes more language-esque -- you can do quite a lot without resorting to vba, you just do it in different ways than iterating over arrays or cascading for loops.

Excel can be very dangerous for business logic because it doesn’t have strict error handling. I’ve seen an insurance company severely misprice an obscure product because somebody accidentally deleted a cell in one row on a different sheet and nobody noticed.

Bugs can happen in python too, of course, but it’s at least a little more robust.

I said that it's an interesting programming language, not a good one -- believe me I have seen some shit too.

But to be fair, not that many programming languages to have strict data validity checking built in/mandatory out of the box -- you can implement that in Excel too, it's not even that hard -- just a little conditional formatting on key cells can go a long way, and if you really wanted to you could probably get pretty advanced.

But Excel users tend not to be that interested in this sort of thing, because most of them are also bad programmers.

to be fair, not that many programming languages to have strict data validity checking built in/mandatory out of the box

I'm sure you're right, and certainly python doesn't. Type hints aren't binding, etc etc.

If you'll forgive me for changing my tune partway in, what I meant to convey is that I don't like the way that excel splays the entire workspace out in front of you, allowing you to change the value of any variable at any time, anywhere through the history of the 'code' because it's not imperative in the same way that code is. That allows way more scope for weird, hard-to-find bugs. (Yes, you can lock cells but often people don't, or they lock the wrong ones, or they unlock something to edit it and forget to re-lock).

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