Re:Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs
by anigbrowl on Wednesday November 22, 2017 @03:53PM
(#15760515)
The grid of cells is your memory space. Coders like looking at a stack. Spreadsheet users like looking at the registers.
Which you prefer depends to some extent on which end of the problem you're coming from; if you're starting out with a lot of domain knowledge, a spreadsheet is attractive because you can look at the data, see whether the way it's being stored/processed is basically correct by spot checking it, and then automate. I'll still often reach for a spreadsheet if I don't know off the top of my head what the rules or relationships are and I need the equivalent of a whiteboard with logic.
If you have a top-down perspective and you want to automate a process whose fundamentals you know well, code is more comfortable. And you can go back and expand, modify, or adjust it later. But two things I don't like about code for handling large volumes of data are that I have to construct some sort of viewer to format the output (requiring more coding, or slower bug discovery if I press ahead without), and endless typing I like selecting things from menus and tool palettes because while I don't mind holding an instruction set in my head I don't like doing the same for every library I might want to use, especially remembering all the parameters. I hate hate hate writing glue code and want the computer to do that stuff for me.
Fortunately a lot of these problems seem to be receding thanks to tools like Jupyter and some of the promising Flow-based programming tools that let you easily visualize structure, code, and visualization without getting bogged down in details.
I should add that I prefer hacking to software engineering; that is, I'm only interested in programming as a means to an end of having a customizable tool for myself rather than building a product for other people, so I want spend as little of my time as possible on constructing the tool.
Which you prefer depends to some extent on which end of the problem you're coming from; if you're starting out with a lot of domain knowledge, a spreadsheet is attractive because you can look at the data, see whether the way it's being stored/processed is basically correct by spot checking it, and then automate. I'll still often reach for a spreadsheet if I don't know off the top of my head what the rules or relationships are and I need the equivalent of a whiteboard with logic.
If you have a top-down perspective and you want to automate a process whose fundamentals you know well, code is more comfortable. And you can go back and expand, modify, or adjust it later. But two things I don't like about code for handling large volumes of data are that I have to construct some sort of viewer to format the output (requiring more coding, or slower bug discovery if I press ahead without), and endless typing I like selecting things from menus and tool palettes because while I don't mind holding an instruction set in my head I don't like doing the same for every library I might want to use, especially remembering all the parameters. I hate hate hate writing glue code and want the computer to do that stuff for me.
Fortunately a lot of these problems seem to be receding thanks to tools like Jupyter and some of the promising Flow-based programming tools that let you easily visualize structure, code, and visualization without getting bogged down in details.
I should add that I prefer hacking to software engineering; that is, I'm only interested in programming as a means to an end of having a customizable tool for myself rather than building a product for other people, so I want spend as little of my time as possible on constructing the tool.