The problem is you only hear about botched excel jobs - you never hear about all the successful projects, so when you hear a horror story you just jump to the conclusion excel sucks.
Ok, ask a geneticist to build what they need with their “off the shelf” parts you mentioned vs 90% of the time being self sufficient with excel and allowing them to, you know, do genetics work. (The other 10 percent being where it makes sense to build something more custom).
Reminds me of the classic HN post when Dropbox had just launched where the user exclaimed “this is just a mounted blah blah using subversion blah anyone can do it” (paraphrased)
That old Dropbox post summarizes this mindset quite well.
And if being practical with your head not in the clouds making sane business AND technical decisions is what the 90s were like, man I missed out.
I guess at the end of the day we’re arguing over where you draw the line regarding when to stop using excel and graduate to something different, a blurry line that at the end of the day is a judgement call.
Oh and for the record I wasn’t even arguing against or for this particular use case in this post - speaking more in general terms.
I worked with a couple. They stop being geneticists rather quickly because the salary for someone who can use python well is about 4 times that of someone working on genes. Keeping them away from coding is now an executive decision since university departments can't pay competitive salaries.
The dropbox post was right. Knowing someone who wins a lottery is no reason to conclude spending all your money on lottery tickets is a good investment. Which is as much as I said in that thread when it happened. That they were solving a problem for idiots comes with the problem that idiots are too stupid to realize when a problem is solved, so you need to focus on looking like you've solved it instead. Funnily enough dropbox spent herculean amounts of effort on polishing the UI.
>And if being practical with my head not in the clouds making sane business AND technical decisions is what the 90s were like, man I missed out.
Ok, ask a geneticist to build what they need with their “off the shelf” parts you mentioned vs 90% of the time being self sufficient with excel and allowing them to, you know, do genetics work. (The other 10 percent being where it makes sense to build something more custom).
Reminds me of the classic HN post when Dropbox had just launched where the user exclaimed “this is just a mounted blah blah using subversion blah anyone can do it” (paraphrased)
That old Dropbox post summarizes this mindset quite well.
And if being practical with your head not in the clouds making sane business AND technical decisions is what the 90s were like, man I missed out.
I guess at the end of the day we’re arguing over where you draw the line regarding when to stop using excel and graduate to something different, a blurry line that at the end of the day is a judgement call.
Oh and for the record I wasn’t even arguing against or for this particular use case in this post - speaking more in general terms.