A Spreadsheet Way of Knowledge (1984) | Hacker News Reader

A Spreadsheet Way of Knowledge (1984)

medium.com

119 pointstbolse13 comments

Great quote about how spreadsheets where empowering:

The company’s chief financial officer wanted certain information, and his top “experts” had difficulty providing it. So one weekend he brought an Apple computer and a copy of VisiCalc home with him. Monday morning, he called his people in and showed them how he had gotten the information he had been clamoring for. “With one swipe of the diskette, he cut them off at the knees.” Stein said. “He out-teched them. His experts! He’d cut the chain. The following week, they all came down to learn VisiCalc – fast.”

That's the kind of disruptive technonology that'll get you sales. Making things done, and having Cx0s demanding your product.

This is a really great article. This part is so good:

The spreadsheet embodies, embraces, that end, and ultimately serves to reinforce it. As Marshall McLuhan observed, “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.” The spreadsheet is a tool, and it is also a world view — reality by the numbers. If the perceptions of those who play a large part in shaping our world are shaped by spreadsheets, it is important that all of us understand what this tool can and cannot do.

Steve Sinofsky (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Sinofsky) made a similar point on HN yesterday:

Second, people tend to underestimate the way that new tools, as ineffective as they are, drive changes in the very definition of work. Said another way, people forget that tools can also define the work and jobs people have. It isn't like work was always "mail around a 10MB presentation before the meeting". In fact a long time ago meeting agendas were typed out in courier by a typist -- that job was defined by the Selectric. The tools that created presentations, attachments, and follow up email defined a style of working. While we're reading all this, the exponential rise of mobile is changing what it means to work--to go to a meeting, to collaborate, to decide, to create, etc.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8525444

This is a good read, and far from a one-sided paean of praise for the spreadsheet. Lots of discussion of pitfalls.

This is a fun quote:

Already, the spreadsheet has redefined the nature of some jobs; to be an accountant in the age of spreadsheet program is — well, almost sexy.

As an accountant, sexy is not how I feel. I think the right word is sexworker... I kid.

Stockman’s sleight of hand was fairly easy to discern. In 1981, electronic spreadsheets were just coming into their own, and the kind of sophisticated modeling Stockman did was still done chiefly on mainframe computers. The output he was working with wasn’t in the now-familiar spreadsheet format; instead, the formulas appeared in one place and the results in another. You could see what you were getting. That cannot be said of electronic spreadsheets, which don’t display the formulas that govern their calculations.

This is the real double-edged sword of spreadsheets. They simultaneously surface data, logic and presentation. This enables a very fluid modelling process because you can see everything that's happening... at first. Eventually these things always become intractable hairballs, dumped on the desk of the office "Spreadsheet Mechanic" for critical repair. Ugh.

Excel's Data Tables, ODBC connectivity and named ranges help with this. It gives you have some assurance that the raw data comes from a Source Of Truth and hasn't been totally borked. Unfortunately, most users (that I have worked with) don't understand how to use these features properly, leading to a multitude of math crimes.

Everytime I read these accounts of breakthroughs I'm baffled by how everything looks different on hindsight:

Bricklin’s teachers at Harvard thought he was wasting his time: why would a manager want to do a spreadsheet on one of those “toy” computers?

or the one about the origins of the telephone:

The invention is practically worthless. Don't through your money away!

After the spreadsheets were going full steam you often heard or read how people scoffed at why anyone would want to play games on a business machine. Most people played on their Atari or Commodore consoles not on an expensive "IBM Compatible PC".

I think, spreadsheet is at least to calculation what word processors are to writing.

Not just calculation, but abstract data comprehension. It's a fair bit more flexible than the word processor in this analogy.

Yes, I think similar. That's the reason, I wrote "at least".

This article points out again, that just in writing programs or defining a process for an artificial intelligence processor, the knowledge put into the system influences the view of the system.

Creating a spreadsheet model is similar to creating a Knowledge Representation of a financial or mathematical system. The interdependencies within the spreadsheet mimic variables whose values are tied together by causation.

Does anyone know if there is a spreadsheet interface for some of the CLP or Prolog programming systems?

Reading this delightful blast in the past, made me realize how much I miss Borland's Quattro Pro editable keyboard macros, before becoming defanged by a competitor, Lotus?

That was a long time ago, Open Office still does not have this -- since I last looked. Think if emacs lost its elisp editable recording keyboard macros for some reason, what a loss. This is evidence progress is not monotonic increasing.

It is incredible how much software is written solely to "do better than a spreadsheet." And how much fails at it.

Great article.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com