The spreadsheet is a simulation machine | Hacker News Reader

The spreadsheet is a simulation machine

arbesman.substack.com

88 pointsarbesman37 comments

Just like Coca-Cola isn't competing with Pepsi, but with water; most B2B SaaS companies aren't competing with other SaaSes, but with Excel. Many of them don't even realize it. Excel seems to have a kind of "hacker repulsion field" that makes programmers consistently underestimate its capabilities.

Did you know that nowadays it has lexical scoping, dynamically sized spill arrays, first class lambdas, map/filter/reduce in formulae? Plus an entire separate purely functional query language + a relational database-like thing for ETL work? Normies are flinging closures around!

Just imagine if middle management figured they could do thier stuff in Excel that they pay $Foo SaaS vendor 9k per month for.

Yep, you guessed it they'd just do absolutely nothing.

The repulsion field is incredibly strong. Even with known field harmonics and modulation frequency I just can’t get through!

Cool that there have been radical improvements in recent years, that haven't broken legacy spreadsheets.

oh yeah, M Language is my jam. powerquery is awesome, ive made it do terrible things, and it worked great. Helped me troubleshoot python code by building the same script in powerquery/m language.

How does this make sense given the fact that both sell water?

And Excel's capabilities are hidden behind an awful interface, so it's only natural that people are repulsed into the alternatives if they have the required knowledge/skills

>How does this make sense given the fact that both sell water?

In that Cola and Pepsi sell overpriced flavored and colored mixes of water, as opposed to regular water, which is the "default drink".

>And Excel's capabilities are hidden behind an awful interface, so it's only natural that people are repulsed into the alternatives if they have the required knowledge/skills

Excel's capabilities are all about the inteface. That's where the power comes from, not from having a SUM method or a way to filter.

> Excel's capabilities are all about the inteface

And so are its limitations (though not inherently so, just through decades of neglect), that's where the power is handicapped despite the existence of "first class lambdas" and the like, which explains the field

tap water

Dasani (coke) and Aquafina (pepsi) are municipal water (i.e. tap).

There are very few pieces of software I have most respect for than Excel. It powers entire industries, from Finance to Science to Big Tech, is stable as hell, backward compatible, and won't stop innovating. And now you can run Python on it - I'd say it would dominate the world now, but it's already there.

It's still not up to scratch for advanced stats - SPSS has a much worse UI, but much better performance and more powerful tools for big datasets.

Sure beats VisiCalc and Lotus123

This view of spreadsheets is 100% accurate, beautiful, and inspiring. Spreadsheets have brought the power of computation to everyone.

... but I love to contrast this view with the behavior that Joel Spolsky observed: "... We visited dozens of Excel customers, and did not see anyone using Excel to actually perform what you would call 'calculations.' Almost all of them were using Excel because it was a convenient way to create a table. [snip] Suddenly we understood why Lotus Improv, which was this fancy futuristic spreadsheet that was going to make Excel obsolete, had failed completely: because it was great at calculations, but terrible at creating tables, and everyone was using Excel for tables, not calculations." https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2012/01/06/how-trello-is-diff...

Fantastic observation. I once saw someone calculating the sum of a column (just a few numbers, ok) with a calculator!

There is a really famous screenshot in Korea of an old manager telling a new hire to NOT use excel functions and do it by hand (and shortly became a meme because of its absurdity). I’ve also heard similar things had happened in Japan.

That should be considered a firable offense on the part of the manager and borderline professional malpractice.

I need this screenshot.

Plot twist: the manager is concerned with floating point precision and the calculation require fractions to be carried throughout

Well if it's in excel those fractions have already been destroyed.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/troubleshoot/excel/...

Hence demanding it to be done by hand from original integer entries.

Here you go. The messages are a hoot.

To paraphrase the last sentence:

"There are appropriate tools for each tasks. Just like you don't use the knife that you use to slaughter cows to slaughter chickens. And computers are the knife to slaughter cows in this case."

https://imgur.com/a/T4rrav4

Also why the hipster war on the table element was doomed to fail in html

What war are you referring to, and what hipsters? As someone who used tables extensively for layout at the time, there was never any war against it, just a desire for better layout via CSS which is what we have today (flexbox, grid).

Calling it a war against tables for actual tabular data is a bit over the top.

Oh, there definitely was a war.

There was also a desire for a better layour (flexbox, grid) but there was a war against tables for layout ("not semantic") even when the other option was a pile of hacks and kludges based on "float".

Table elements are pretty much completely absent from modern web dev though?

Layout yes. But not for tabular data, they're great for that.

Yeah only took about six or seven major revisions.

I remember an anecdote where some office worker after years of using Excel was very surprised to learn that the “tables program” could also do calculations.

My first real programming job involved creating cellular computation simulations for a physics professor. I used Excel and VBA... worked surprisingly well.

with greater power comes greater responsibilities, I hereby present you

https://eusprig.org/research-info/horror-stories/

I wonder how many people made errors with adding machines. And data entry into apps. My hunch is that mistakes will be made.

I can't find the reference, but:

There's a building somewhere with the digits of pi painted on a ceiling. I presume it celebrates someone (maybe 18th Century) who calculated N digits. One of the numbers is painted larger and a different colour because it marks where the person first went wrong in the calculation

Excel errors can carry to wrong decisions on a global level.

https://theconversation.com/economists-an-excel-error-and-th...

Indeed, and until another platform emerges for people do to consequential work, Excel will be where they make consequential mistakes.

I'm still waiting on one of my investment banker friends to drop me the link to whatever high powered Excel bootcamp they got pushed through in their first week to acquire their supernatural fluency with the thing. I could memorize all the keyboard shortcuts with Anki, but past that, I have no idea where to go next.

The spreadsheet is like an automated abacus

"an"//"billions of", all working at once

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