OT and just my opinion: it seems to exists an unfortunate trend in the promotion of new ideas where, instead of simply exposing the virtues of the idea on its own, it first needs to knock down the (proven and world adopted) predecessor as something unpolished, unplanned, untested and, in general, a bad idea from the start.
Compare this trend, for instance, with the first Linux announcement by Linus Torvalds [1] below.
It is an unfortunate trend because it ends up polarizing and creating unnecessary division among the early adopters of the new idea and the current userbase of the old one.
I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready. I’d like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons) among other things).
I’ve currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40), and things seem to work. This implies that I’ll get something practical within a few months, and I’d like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions are welcome, but I won’t promise I’ll implement them :-)
PS. Yes – it’s free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs. It is NOT protable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that’s all I have :-(.
The article itself is much more positive on spreadsheets than the headline -- it suggests improvements to the underlying data / computational model while preserving the interface.
And it's about time somebody said something nice about spreadsheets. Go to your average (non-software) engineer and ask to see an engineering model. Chances are, it's in Excel. It's less buggy than you expect, because your average engineer is going to notice and fix nonsensical results. Unlike the scientists the author is talking about, your average engineer is looking at very similar data from day to day and is attuned to anomalous behavior.
I think there's a lot of room for a tool like the one described by the article that includes built-in validation and is git-friendly. However, given the overwhelming dominance of Excel, it's going to have to integrate with, rather than replace Excel.
Thanks for the comments. Actually, I was just working on importing Excel spreadsheets into Stencila sheets last night. Some interesting aspects involved in translating Excel formulas into R expressions e.g. `AVERAGE(A1:A5)` to `mean(A1:A5)`. To do it properly looks like we'll need to build an Excel formula parser. But do-able - and could be fun!
How many times have we heard over decades now "yada yada yda is dead" as a headline? Cobol, CD's, PC's, even vinyl records, nothing really dies and especially Excel which will probably still be used for decades to come.
Thanks for the comment. Yes, the title of the article does sound negative (I was just trying to for something that caught the eye - something that is perhaps harder to do these days than back in 1991 when Linux was released). But the body of article is supportive of the spreadsheet approach and looks to ways that we can improve it and reach out to the existing user base - not to knock it down.
Compare this trend, for instance, with the first Linux announcement by Linus Torvalds [1] below.
It is an unfortunate trend because it ends up polarizing and creating unnecessary division among the early adopters of the new idea and the current userbase of the old one.
From: [email protected] (Linus Benedict Torvalds)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: What would you like to see most in minix?
Summary: small poll for my new operating system
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 25 Aug 91 20:57:08 GMT
Organization: University of Helsinki
Hello everybody out there using minix –
I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready. I’d like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons) among other things).
I’ve currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40), and things seem to work. This implies that I’ll get something practical within a few months, and I’d like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions are welcome, but I won’t promise I’ll implement them :-)
Linus ([email protected])
PS. Yes – it’s free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs. It is NOT protable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that’s all I have :-(.
[1] http://www.thelinuxdaily.com/2010/04/the-first-linux-announc...