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From: Don Y <blockedofcourse@foo.invalid>
Newsgroups: sci.electronics.design
Subject: Re: Excel and accountants, good post on LinkedIn
Date: Sat, 31 Jan 2026 19:31:04 -0700
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Xref: csiph.com sci.electronics.design:739979

> Oh dear, another example of ineptness triumphing over technical
> goodness.

There is a mistaken emphasis on usability and deferred error
checking -- to make "coding" less difficult for the inept.

Even in languages that have scoping rules that allow you to
be more pedantic in defining identifiers, people choose to
ignore them as an expedient.

"The larger the dictionary, the FEWER the number of misspellings
the spell-checker will find!"

Similarly, laziness in deploying invariants lets errors in
*processing* creep into data and persist -- often beyond
the point where they COULD have been noticed!

("This value can't exist here!  But, once you get PAST this
point, the code will treat it as valid data...")

The worst misuse (IM) of Excel is in place of a database.
Yet, people seem terrified to NOT be able to see their data
at a glance (really?  can you SPOT an error that would merit
its presentation, thusly?)

[I have encountered datasets maintained in excel (and other spreadsheets)
that were horrendously large and impossible to manage.  Yet, offering
to restructure the data in a database brings terror to the users...]

> I repeatedly complain to an R user which is an Excel user via
> quotations like so: "languages like PHP and Mathematica are still
> heedless to variable misspellings; [. . .] reversing bad design
> decisions, is often impossible once there is a community of users. The
> shortcomings of Perl, PHP, CSS, JavaScript, etc, are going to persist
> [. . .] JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Excel [. . .] having little type
> safety" says
> Harold Thimbleby, "Heedless programming: ignoring detectable error is
> a widespread hazard", "Software: Practice and Experience"