Pontifications

  • It’s 2017, can we have better software development tools for everybody not just Excel which is dumbed down and makes complicated things too hard and too slow or things like R which makes simple things too hard and forces people to use silly unnecessary things like loops and text editors?
  • Solutions: see Bret Victor et al’s amazing programming environment which if properly implemented and designed would work well for the “crazy brain damaged by Excel” folks as well as the “crazy brain damaged by traditional 1950s style procedural programming” folks like myself
  • The above “rant” :-) was inspired by the amazing R for Excel users by Gordon Shotwell, some juicy quotes:

QUOTE

"
Like most people, I first learned to work with numbers through an Excel spreadsheet. After graduating with an undergraduate philosophy degree, I somehow convinced a medical device marketing firm to give me a job writing Excel reports on the orthopedic biomaterials market. When I first started, I remember not knowing how to anything, but after a few months I became fairly proficient with the tool, and was able to build all sorts of useful models. When you think about it, this is an amazing feature of Excel. Every day, all over the world, people open up a spreadsheet to do some data entry and then, bit by bit, learn to do increasingly complex analytical tasks. Excel is a master at teaching people how to use Excel.
...
R is not like that. I learned to use R as a side project during law school, and it felt a bit like training with an abusive kung-fu master in the mountains of rural China.
I couldn’t get R to do anything. It wouldn’t read in files, draw a plot or multiply two numbers together. All I could do was generate mystifying errors and get mocked on Stack Overflow for asking redundant questions. This was all made more frustrating by the fact that I could accomplish all of these things in Excel without much difficulty.
This is the basic pain of learning to program. Programming languages are designed to be general in their application and to allow you to accomplish a huge variety of complex tasks with the same basic set of tools. The cost of this generality is a steep learning curve. When you start learning to do basic tasks in R, you are also learning how to do complex things down the road. As you learn more and more, the marginal cost of complex analyses goes down. Excel is the opposite, and is very easy at the beginning, but the marginal cost goes up with the complexity of the problem.
"

END QUOTE

Leave a comment on github