From Newsgroup: comp.arch.embedded

According to Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org>:

It's OK if you are an accountant, I guess.

Accountants have to explain what they are doing to other accountants,
and Excel won't let you do anything that is hard to explain. ...

It's hard to belive that anyone who has used Excel would say that. In my experience, any Excel spreadsheet large enough to be interesting has bugs.

Back in the 1980s I worked on a financial modeling package called Javelin.
You could use it for a lot of the financial stuff people do in spreadsheets (Lotus 1-2-3 at the time.) The models were a lot more structured and it
was far easier to audit them and check that they did what you expected.

Users didn't care, they loved their spreadsheets. Best quote: "It's up to my boss to check if my speadsheets are right."
--
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly
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From Newsgroup: comp.arch.embedded

On Sat, 31 Jan 2026 23:21:28 -0000 (UTC), John Levine
<johnl@taugh.com> wrote:

According to Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org>:

It's OK if you are an accountant, I guess.

Accountants have to explain what they are doing to other accountants,
and Excel won't let you do anything that is hard to explain. ...

It's hard to belive that anyone who has used Excel would say that. In my >experience, any Excel spreadsheet large enough to be interesting has bugs.

Back in the 1980s I worked on a financial modeling package called Javelin. >You could use it for a lot of the financial stuff people do in spreadsheets >(Lotus 1-2-3 at the time.) The models were a lot more structured and it
was far easier to audit them and check that they did what you expected.

Users didn't care, they loved their spreadsheets. Best quote: "It's up to my >boss to check if my speadsheets are right."

Forbes estimates that 88% of spreadsheets contain errors.




John Larkin
Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center
Lunatic Fringe Electronics
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From Newsgroup: comp.arch.embedded

In sci.electronics.design John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> wrote: |-----------------------------------------------------------------------------| |"[. . .] In my | |experience, any Excel spreadsheet large enough to be interesting has bugs. | | | |Back in the 1980s I worked on a financial modeling package called Javelin. | |You could use it for a lot of the financial stuff people do in spreadsheets | |(Lotus 1-2-3 at the time.) The models were a lot more structured and it | |was far easier to audit them and check that they did what you expected. | | | |Users didn't care, they loved their spreadsheets. Best quote: "It's up to my| |boss to check if my speadsheets are right."" | |-----------------------------------------------------------------------------|

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

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"
and
"R crashes" says
HTTPS://CRAN.R-Project.org/doc/FAQ/R-FAQ.html#Lexical-scoping
"missing or incorrect code in R" says HTTPS://CRAN.R-Project.org/doc/FAQ/R-FAQ.html#Others
"errors later in the code" says HTTPS://CRAN.R-Project.org/doc/FAQ/R-FAQ.html#Why-do-my-matrices-lose-dimensions_003f
"About 148,000,000 results" says
HTTPS://RSeek.org
concerning crash
"I find that my R session crashes very often, at random times for
random reasons" says HTTPS://StackOverFlow.com/questions/35318760/how-to-recover-rstudio-session-after-crash
"Session is abruptly aborted as soon as a data.frame is defined with
no error code being printed, except of course; "R encountered a fatal
error. The session was terminated"." says HTTPS://community.RStudio.com/t/rstudio-crashes-when-defining-data-frame-in-version-2023-09-1-or-newer/179120
(S. HTTP://Gloucester.Insomnia247.NL/ fuer Kontaktdaten!)
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