I learned how to do a fucking LOT of statistical shit in my degree. I also learned to get REALLY good at all kinds of shit in Excel.
Guess which helped my career on an actual practical way the most? Guess which made people seek me out at work for help with things?
Sometimes Excel is what’s available. Sometimes it’s just faster to do it that way rather than code up some ridiculously overdone solution in some programming language. Having both skills is best, but don’t shit on opening an excel and just fucking getting it done, whatever it is.
If used right, it can also be a great equalizer with those less technically skilled in your workplace. You can quickly format and tune things and even layer a little bit of vba to make their lives easier without having to get into the complexity of an entire bespoke coded solution.
Also, a reminder for those in the back. For most of us, we aren’t in college to learn a specific skill so much as we are there to learn how to be taught. To prove we are capable of taking instructions and producing results as requested.
If you never understand this, then you’ll never understand later why you fail to land a high quality job.
Blows Excel out of the water, and it’s not even close. And it’s free, open source, and completely extensible (with Python, not some godforsaken excuse for a programming language).
Learning to learn is what the 12 years of babysitting we all go through is supposed to be doing. The fact you overlook that is why we have a >50% illiteracy rate in the USA. Post secondary education is 100% about learning advanced skills and developing the techniques needed for a career. Saying otherwise is why companies are looking for doctoral degrees for entry level positions and they can all burn in hell.
we aren’t in college to learn a specific skill so much as we are there to learn how to be taught.
I really like this idea, but prefer one small change: I think it’s best to learn how to learn.
Learning how to be taught is part of that, and a large part. Understanding when to absorb information, rely on experts, and apply yourself until you improve is fundamental. You won’t get any arguments from me there.
But being taught is only one facet of learning. Sometimes experts aren’t really experts, or don’t have the learner’s best interests at heart, or omit things to protect their own interests or ideology.
Learning how to learn involves fostering fundamental curiosity, not being afraid to fail, asking all the questions even dumb ones or those with seemingly obvious answers. Finding out “why” something works instead of just “how”. Fundamentally curious people who learn as a habit tend to also develop a scientific method-like approach to evaluating incoming information: “Ok, this is the information I’m presented with, let’s assume the opposite, can I prove the null hypothesis?” This acts as a pretty good bullshit detector, or at the very least trains learners to be skeptical, to trust but verify, which is enormously important in the age of misinformation.
Being taught generally tapers off as someone gets older, or becomes an expert. Learning never needs to taper off, so long as your brain still works.
I worked for a Big Company that was cutting back and dropped their Oracle contracts, forcing all the DBAs to work in Access. Then they fired all the DBAs, forcing everyone to either try to figure out Access or switch to Excel. Guess which way they went.
In my last job at that company, my department had built an Excel spreadsheet (database) so large and full of calculations they had to request money to update our machines to 64-bit Windows and 16GB RAM just to run it.
For most of us, we aren’t in college to learn a specific skill so much as we are there to learn how to be taught. To prove we are capable of taking instructions and producing results as requested.
This is true to the extent that you won’t be solving Organic Chemistry 1 or Linear Algebra exercises at your workplace, but I think it’s misleading. If anything, from my experience, people focus too much on producing the results and not enough on learning the skills. A lot of people stay on the mindset of “I only need the degree / where am I going to need that / the industry has moved on from this” and don’t build strong foundations
A lot of government stuff requires that they have complete provenance of all code in the system. When you have people contributing to it from different places - potentially different countries - they get nervous about it.
You’d think they’d also be worried about most proprietary software being a black box when it comes to their code. But it could be only a secondary concern
We were restricted even on some proprietary software (especially if it was from a foreign owned company), but you’d be surprised how much scrutiny some of the major packages have had.
This is more of an argument for LibreOffice (and in line with the post you’re replying to) than it’s an argument for using a programming language, let alone a specific one.
Current version of Excel stripped out a macro I made to make a specific task easier. It didn’t just block it from running. It refused to let me even see it anymore.
LibreOffice allowed me to see it again so I could re-implement it temporarily. I love how often Microsoft’s own tools can’t do what FOSS can with Microsoft files.
R, the language where dependency resolution is built upon thoughts and prayers.
Say what you want about Excel, but compatibility is kinda decent (ignoring locales and DNA sequences). Meanwhile, good luck replicating your R installation on another machine.
PS: Excel will often fail if your system has a different default language. Like in many European countries one and a half is 1,5, not 1.5. Excel can’t take it.
I have fucked around enough with R’s package management. Makes Python look like a god damn dream. Containers around it is just polishing a turd. Still have nightmares from building containers with R in automated pipelines, ending up at like 8 GB per container.
Also, good luck getting reproducible container builds.
Regarding locales - yes, I mentioned that. Thats’s a shitty design decision if I ever saw one. But within a locale, most Excel documents from last century and onwards should work reasonably well. (Well, normal Excel files. Macros and VB really shouldn’t work…). And it works on normal office machines, and you can email the files, and you can give it to your boss. And your boss can actually do something with it.
I also think Excel should be replaced by something. But not R.
I learned how to do a fucking LOT of statistical shit in my degree. I also learned to get REALLY good at all kinds of shit in Excel.
Guess which helped my career on an actual practical way the most? Guess which made people seek me out at work for help with things?
Sometimes Excel is what’s available. Sometimes it’s just faster to do it that way rather than code up some ridiculously overdone solution in some programming language. Having both skills is best, but don’t shit on opening an excel and just fucking getting it done, whatever it is.
If used right, it can also be a great equalizer with those less technically skilled in your workplace. You can quickly format and tune things and even layer a little bit of vba to make their lives easier without having to get into the complexity of an entire bespoke coded solution.
Also, a reminder for those in the back. For most of us, we aren’t in college to learn a specific skill so much as we are there to learn how to be taught. To prove we are capable of taking instructions and producing results as requested.
If you never understand this, then you’ll never understand later why you fail to land a high quality job.
https://www.visidata.org/
Blows Excel out of the water, and it’s not even close. And it’s free, open source, and completely extensible (with Python, not some godforsaken excuse for a programming language).
Learning to learn is what the 12 years of babysitting we all go through is supposed to be doing. The fact you overlook that is why we have a >50% illiteracy rate in the USA. Post secondary education is 100% about learning advanced skills and developing the techniques needed for a career. Saying otherwise is why companies are looking for doctoral degrees for entry level positions and they can all burn in hell.
I really like this idea, but prefer one small change: I think it’s best to learn how to learn.
Learning how to be taught is part of that, and a large part. Understanding when to absorb information, rely on experts, and apply yourself until you improve is fundamental. You won’t get any arguments from me there.
But being taught is only one facet of learning. Sometimes experts aren’t really experts, or don’t have the learner’s best interests at heart, or omit things to protect their own interests or ideology.
Learning how to learn involves fostering fundamental curiosity, not being afraid to fail, asking all the questions even dumb ones or those with seemingly obvious answers. Finding out “why” something works instead of just “how”. Fundamentally curious people who learn as a habit tend to also develop a scientific method-like approach to evaluating incoming information: “Ok, this is the information I’m presented with, let’s assume the opposite, can I prove the null hypothesis?” This acts as a pretty good bullshit detector, or at the very least trains learners to be skeptical, to trust but verify, which is enormously important in the age of misinformation.
Being taught generally tapers off as someone gets older, or becomes an expert. Learning never needs to taper off, so long as your brain still works.
“Sometimes Excel is what’s available.”
I worked for a Big Company that was cutting back and dropped their Oracle contracts, forcing all the DBAs to work in Access. Then they fired all the DBAs, forcing everyone to either try to figure out Access or switch to Excel. Guess which way they went.
In my last job at that company, my department had built an Excel spreadsheet (database) so large and full of calculations they had to request money to update our machines to 64-bit Windows and 16GB RAM just to run it.
Noooo
This is true to the extent that you won’t be solving Organic Chemistry 1 or Linear Algebra exercises at your workplace, but I think it’s misleading. If anything, from my experience, people focus too much on producing the results and not enough on learning the skills. A lot of people stay on the mindset of “I only need the degree / where am I going to need that / the industry has moved on from this” and don’t build strong foundations
Lemmy Silver™🥈 incoming !
FOSS is always available. R is always available. Your points remain but you’re never in a situation where Excel is the only thing you can use.
Where I worked, many of the contacts specifically said we could not use open source software, so no, it is not always available.
Why did the contracts specify that?
A lot of government stuff requires that they have complete provenance of all code in the system. When you have people contributing to it from different places - potentially different countries - they get nervous about it.
You’d think they’d also be worried about most proprietary software being a black box when it comes to their code. But it could be only a secondary concern
We were restricted even on some proprietary software (especially if it was from a foreign owned company), but you’d be surprised how much scrutiny some of the major packages have had.
You are if company policy dictates that’s all you can use.
This is more of an argument for LibreOffice (and in line with the post you’re replying to) than it’s an argument for using a programming language, let alone a specific one.
Current version of Excel stripped out a macro I made to make a specific task easier. It didn’t just block it from running. It refused to let me even see it anymore.
LibreOffice allowed me to see it again so I could re-implement it temporarily. I love how often Microsoft’s own tools can’t do what FOSS can with Microsoft files.
R, the language where dependency resolution is built upon thoughts and prayers.
Say what you want about Excel, but compatibility is kinda decent (ignoring locales and DNA sequences). Meanwhile, good luck replicating your R installation on another machine.
You heard about conda/containers/pixi/whatever?
PS: Excel will often fail if your system has a different default language. Like in many European countries one and a half is 1,5, not 1.5. Excel can’t take it.
I have fucked around enough with R’s package management. Makes Python look like a god damn dream. Containers around it is just polishing a turd. Still have nightmares from building containers with R in automated pipelines, ending up at like 8 GB per container.
Also, good luck getting reproducible container builds.
Regarding locales - yes, I mentioned that. Thats’s a shitty design decision if I ever saw one. But within a locale, most Excel documents from last century and onwards should work reasonably well. (Well, normal Excel files. Macros and VB really shouldn’t work…). And it works on normal office machines, and you can email the files, and you can give it to your boss. And your boss can actually do something with it.
I also think Excel should be replaced by something. But not R.