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by matt4077
2796 days ago
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It may be useful to take people's actual behaviour into account, instead of starting from the assumption that they must be idiots. As it happens, no tool has been more successful at making this idea of "everyone being a coder" than the spreadsheet. It's an excellent (pun intended) gateway drug, with low barriers of entry, and a value proposition that was obvious enough to get accountants to spend 5 figures on a Mac when computers were something completely new. Sure, the language is clunky. But it's apparently enough for most peoples' needs. I can't immediately think of any reasons for this almost moralistic criticism of Excel. It seems like it would be a weekend project to convert Excel worksheets to sequential code in a universally-readable textfile, plus a separate CSV for the data. That would make sharing and reproducibility just as easy as easy as getting them to switch out their complete toolchain. But I have doubts that unwillingness to share code & data is actually a technical problems, instead of a lack of incentives/embarrassment of sharing ones' awful code/dreams of patents future/privacy issues. I'm also not convinced that Julia as I have experienced it would be any better for long-term reproducibility. Last time I tried Julia, about every second package had a specific version that it required, and very few of them shared their preferences. |
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> That would make sharing and reproducibility just as easy as easy as getting them to switch out their complete toolchain
Reproducibility is about reading as much as it is getting the right number. Excel hides the operations from the reader, so that there could be a cell X182that has the key operation that you never area able to trace back.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-04-18/faq-reinh...
But I totally agree that an excel spreadsheet is the most popular and easiest to learn programming language on the planet. That's why I mentioned ipython notebooks above. Excel is great because you can enter something and immediately see your results in front of you, which is something that jupyter does as well. But we definitely need to draw more from excel's UI and workflow if we want people to switch to those tools.
> But I have doubts that unwillingness to share code & data is actually a technical problems, instead of a lack of incentives/embarrassment of sharing ones' awful code/dreams of patents future/privacy issues.
That's true. But at the very least internal use of plain text and git would be immediately helpful for collaboration and project management (branching, code reviews etc.). I think you underestimate how unwieldy a project like this can get very quickly.
> Last time I tried Julia, about every second package had a specific version that it required, and very few of them shared their preferences.
The landscape is still settling down after the 1.0 release. I share the concern about particular version numbers, but notice that basically all packages are on 0.X in SemVer. When the ecosystem makes it to 1.0 as well things will improve dramatically.