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by worldsayshi
1365 days ago
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I realize this is all a "bad idea" but I'd like to hear what the root reasons are that it really is such a bad idea. It certainly seems to be a more maintainable way to do it than many "good ideas" I've thought of. Do you want a complex scaling algorithm that takes the number of visitors and last month's revenue into account? Just write a simple formula! |
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I really don't like the idea of a stateful document, in general but for configuration especially. If I have to look through the edit history to figure out why the document is behaving in a certain way, that's a hard no from me. (Reading history to understand intentions is a different matter - you should be able to understand a document's behavior just by reading it though.)
This is fairly tolerable for one-off spreadsheets because you're free to throw the entire thing away, import your data again, and have a clean start. A Google sheet which is a living document, that's just a liability in my mind. I know people do this with Excel, and I can only assume it's leagues better than Sheets.
A lot of this would be fixed by using a CSV and/or by using a reduced spreadsheet program that doesn't carry do much baggage & isn't fit for analysis purposes. But at that point I kinda wonder whether SQLite is what you're looking for. You'd be able to do all the functions you'd like, but you could introspect to your hearts content, and there's a huge variety of good tooling to choose from; you wouldn't be forcing everyone to use the same interface. You'd also eliminate a dependency on Google Sheets, which as someone pointed out elsewhere in the thread, might be correlated with your downtime if you're using GKE.