[camccann]

I'm surprised the article didn't say more about the phenomenon of businesses using gargantuan Excel spreadsheets held together with a Escher-like tangle of macros and formulas. As much as the idea makes "real" programmers shudder, it's one of the best examples of otherwise not-particularly-technical people doing some manner of programming to automate their day-to-day tasks.

[drkevorkian]

And it seems like a prime example of where a more widespread programming literacy would be beneficial. You don't need any sort of deep CS knowledge to be able to use the superior tools out there, just a foundational literacy.

[mhansen]

What superior tools are you thinking about?

[Herring]

source control, debugging, bug trackers, etc? But they probably don't need the full engineering toolkit..

[bmj]

It's surprising how some non-programmers cannot wrap their heads around source control. I work in a high-regulated environment, so we produce reams of documentation for a project, and various non-technical members of the team must be able to use our bug tracking system (even for so-called spec defects) and version control.

My current project's manager (the "product manager," who isn't necessarily technical) uses source control, but checks in/adds a new file for each revision. We've tried to explain that's what version control does but he just doesn't get it.

[allenp]

Sounds like a pain point - better get to work on subversion for ms office ;)

EDIT: I just realized after I wrote this that Sharepoint has some of this functionality (versioning) but imo is a bear to use.

[bmj]

The word on the street is that we'll be moving to Sharepoint for some document management. I'll be curious to see how that goes.

My group (R&D) has been using a home-grown requirements management system for a few small projects, and ideally we'd move to that for our specs.

[xtho]

Tools that don't have difficulties computing large numbers maybe?

[thwarted]

I'm always surprised (but I shouldn't be) by how much effort people go through to keep their house of cards Excel spreadsheet stable and working all while being under the impression that said spreadsheet is lessening the amount of work they do. Working really hard to fix a gargantuan Excel spreadsheets held together with a Escher-like tangle of macros and formulas is not what I call automation.

[dasil003]

A lot of ostensibly talented developers do the same thing—it's not always easy to predict in advance what is the most efficient expenditure of effort.

[thwarted]

You'd have be stupid to disagree with that. But there's a difference between "most efficient" and "efficient at all". I've seen Excel spreadsheets used to track orders, at a rate of 100 or so a day. Then it gets too big so new spreadsheet files are used and the filenames are dated (using inconsistent date formats, making it difficult to find a spreadsheet for a specific date range, and none of the regular users thought to rename the files). But finding historical orders is a nightmare because the order numbers are not based on dates. And two people need to edit the same spreadsheet at the same time, or someone gets the bright idea that they'll be more efficient if multiple people can enter the orders, so someone makes a copy of the current master, and the changes never get merged in. So there's duplicated data or data for overlapping date ranges in multiple files and no authority on which data is valid, it needs to be looked at every time to find out which one is the "real" version. But even that's hard because columns have been added and removed and reordered on all of them. And most of these issues are not even a matter of "using the right tool for the job", even though the root problem is just that; they are caused by not spending even a half-hour to think about things before doing them, and not having enough experience to say "boy, this is a real headache to deal with". So inefficiencies get piled on top of inefficiencies, all in the name of automation. And the few clueful people who are forced to use the system end up with a bad impression of computers.

If an ostensibly talented developer creates a system like that, they can remove "ostensibly talented" from their title.