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by dvdkon 721 days ago
Maybe it comes back to the feeling of fun mentioned by GP? I also enjoy working with Vim, while LibreOffice Writer is clunky and Word is not much better (though I have no love for LaTeX). I could make a spreadsheet in under an hour, but if it'll make me feel like I'm hacking together something buggy in an inadequate tool, I'd rather spend more time making a web app or a Python script.

Likewise, mandating a file per each class in Java is no big deal on the surface, but having to create and juggle so many files for small classes feels terrible to me, so a seemingly small detail turns me off the language.

I think we should examime these feelings, because they ultimately drive (some part of) our behaviour, and I'd guess they're not just random preferences but are rationalisable.
1 comments
znpy 720 days ago
> I could make a spreadsheet in under an hour, but if it'll make me feel like I'm hacking together something buggy in an inadequate tool, I'd rather spend more time making a web app or a Python script.

Congrats you missed the point entirely and provided me with a perfect example case:

Have you ever spent a considerable amount of time learning Excel, the very same way you did for python?

It’s very likely that excel is perfectly adequate and not buggy at all, you’re just and ignorant (in Excel) and can’t go further than “hacking a spreadsheet together”.

So, have you spent time properly learning other tools or are you one of those everything-expect-what-i-like-sucks ?

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dvdkon 720 days ago
The whole "data and (hidden) code mixed in a seemingly-infinite matrix" concept offends my engineering sensibilities. It's not about bugs in Excel, it's about the bugs my spreadsheets will have since I forgot to fill in that one cell, overran the area used by some formula elsewhere, didn't set the format correctly, so visually all looks good but it breaks a sum...

To get back to my point, working with spreadsheets feels bad (from my experience) because I have to juggle all the things mentioned above. In my favourite programming environments, mistakes of this sort are generally directly evident in the form of errors.

If I had more spreadsheet experience, I would get better at avoiding these mistakes. But I choose to use Python, where they are handled by design.

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