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Comment by rcthompson | Hacker News Reader

I often write a script even if I only have to do something twice. In this case, the point is not to save time, it's to be secure in the knowledge that I did the thing in exactly the same way both times, because it was the same script that did it both times.

(And then it saves time anyway, because it turns out I had to do the thing 20 more times after all.)

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It’s not full proof, but the heuristic that your stakeholder will ask you for the same thing next week (or immediately ask you to do the same thing but slightly differently) has held pretty true for me

yes, I've got a little heuristic I use to tell the beginner analysts at work when to think about automating their work or putting it into a script.

if you're doing something once and once only, maybe it's a candidate for the manual or gui way.

if you think you might do it twice, it's almost certainly time to automate or start programming it.

Anything encountered in business that you encounter more than 1 time is likely to be encountered N times more.

The good old "allow it never, once or n times" :-)

This is spot on! I think sometimes if you do same thing 3 times it is already better to script it, unless you are sure that no further modifications will take place. Scripting will ensure reproducibility and it is invaluable when you can follow your logic later when you already forgot how you come up with that chart.

this is obviously laziness, the first of the three virtues http://threevirtues.com/

Exactly. A little {insert favorite language} snippet is immediately inspectable, also weeks or months or years in the future.

You underestimate my ability to write code that I myself can’t make sense of years (or sometimes even months or weeks) in the future.

Same for me – but that's usually an indicator that the spreadsheet situation would be even worse. We just suck, apparently, but we suck less with code :-)

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