Ask HN: I use excel to develop code. Is this rational? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: I use excel to develop code. Is this rational?

7 pointsgalfarragem8 comments

While a blogger, I develop and update few lists of ~50 links in HTML. I develop it in excel, it allows for example to alphabetically sort the list and take easy track of items already present. I'm not a professional programmer but is this rational? Besides excel I use sublime text.

View on HN

If it works for you, by all means, YES! That's the only relevant question to ask in situations like these.

Changing it to some other platform without a good reason is what would not be rational. Spreadsheets have their uses and this is one of them.

Few years ago I heard about some people making architectural projects with MS Paint. Being a professional in that field, it's hard to consider that rational but as you say: if it works for them..

Funny you should say that. I built a house in Canada using a very simple grid with the framing diagram on it. This was so easy to do that I hit on the idea of using (no kidding) paint shop pro and I drew the whole thing (all four sides + interior structures) like that and used that to frame the house and clad it with OSB. Worked like a charm.

Low tech solutions are at times very effective, I'm pretty sure if I would have done that design in autocad or some other program that I would have been able to make pretty 3D views and such but it would have taken a whole lot longer and the end result (the house) would have been just the same.

I know someone who uses MS Paint instead of photoshop for montage and "3D visualisation" work in his architectural projects. Bonkers.

I'm also not a professional programmer, but I used to do a lot of data analytics for a large company which required lots of SQL.

I often used excel to track my code and keep it organized. Part of this is that most of my work was done in excel; the SQL queries were just to get the data workable. But, so many things would change and it was easy to use the concatenate features of excel to change variable names, table names, and stuff like that.

I am a professional programmer (although not a DBA), and have used excel to generate SQL scripts. You can often just put all the variable in cells and then use string concatenate to add in the parts of a SQL script that repeat. It works well and lets others easily maintain/modify it. These are mostly for throwaway scripts or one-off analysis tasks.

A few years ago I was developing against an API...though that's not how I would have described it then. I copypasted tables from a webpage into Excel and used Mailmerge in MS Word to generate a bunch of functions [ok, actually procedures - it was Pascal],

I'm not a professional programmer either, of course. But it worked pretty well and for a one off exercise was a reasonable way to handle tooling. It's pretty lightweight.

You're fine. I've seen Excel used for far worse.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com