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Comment by jpz | Hacker News Reader

The tone of what you are saying strikes a nerve with me - we had exactly the same issues with Excel in the front office in investment banking.

Unknowable ad-hoc, unversioned spreadsheets running much of the capital of the company.

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That’s a really good comparison. Excel is often used for storing data and doing analysis because it just plain works. And anyone can use it.

Notebooks tend to be the same way. It’s a simple GUI-ish was to do many complex analyses in a quick and dirty way.

And many of the arguments for not using Excel are the same as not using notebooks. Each is good at the initial data exploration stage, but are often abused and used in production when everyone knows it is a bad idea. But it still “works” so it is unlikely to be replaced.

(Especially when those that are working with the data don’t always have the skill set to build out a full production workflow.)

Think of all the damage caused by excel. We replaced one set of avoidable catastrophes for another. But this time there’s no shame.

I'm a computational biologist and Excel has been the bane of my existence for 20 years. We've "known better" for all of that time, but I still deal with people passing around Excel files of data or having common spreadsheets on shared drives (or now Dropbox shared). We all "know better", but Excel is often the first thing that people try to keep track of data, and once a system works, there is just too much inertia to change.

(For what it's worth, I feel the same way about people who try to send me RDS files with dataframes stored as R objects).

However, I think that whoever decided to name genes "OCT4" and "SEPT7" have to share some of the blame here too...

Are you hiring for summer positions?

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