[lars-b2018]

I agree with you. And I wonder how the working paradigms and, importantly, the tools, got defined as they are. Not a criticism, but the tools that won. In the younger days of interactive computing, there seemed to be an explosion of creativity on how to manipulate, use and present information, in systems like these and others. Then continents arose (Lotus 123, Excel, Visicalc), (Wordstar, Word, etc), Emacs.. Office quantized a lot of domains, I think. It locked us into tools as the standard of productivity tools and human computer interaction patterns. And, the majority of users use these in their productive use of their time.

[111111IIIIIII]

> I wonder how the working paradigms and, importantly, the tools, got defined as they are.

Answer: The profit motive.

A cheap retort would be that the profit motive has produced so many great things as well. I am comfortable holding two contradicting ideas in my mind at once, but we need to be careful. The history of computer technology development, including all of its most groundbreaking technological discoveries, is overwhelmingly built on top of publicly funded research with no foreseeable path to profit at the time.

Humans are far more driven by the quest for love, justice, dignity, and discovery than profit. Until we reorganize our society accordingly, we can only expect our greatest accomplishments to be exploited and dismembered by the pursuit of profit.

[marttt]

I've been thinking that mastering the 40+ year old awk language for data manipulation would probably not be harder for a regular accountant than mastering Excel formulae. Being good with awk would possibly add a lot of flexibility to that casual data worker's general computer workflow -- for something like 1% of the cost in terms of computation power.

In reality, because of how tools were introduced to them, I guess most accountants never think outside the GUI-based paradigm.