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Comment by rgrieselhuber | Hacker News Reader

Plenty of open source options that will teach them 90% of what most people will need to know. Taxpayer money should not be going to these corporations.

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Google Workspace is free to schools. Therefore it 'costs' significantly less than running the infrastructure to service accounts for several 100's to 1000's of staff and kids using a FOSS solution. Of course, there are other email providers, but they are rarely free. They'll also still need to put security solutions in front of it, or indeed Exchange Online, because the offerings are rudimentary to say the least, but they are more solid out-of-the-box than OSS solutions and provide for a lower overall TCO and cost-to-serve. Pragmatism, where technology decisions and tax-payers money are concerned, should trump ideology every time.

It's pragmatic to not continue the monopolies that cost the taxpayer money on an ongoing basis.

The point is to not pay Microsoft money to promote Microsoft's continued monopoly, which will mean you have to pay them money again next year.

Any school paying for closed source software when they could be funding a company to make open source software is doing it wrong. Same with textbooks.

100s of 1000s of schools all paying for something they won't own and will have to pay for again in the future.

You bring up a good point, which is other costs beyond financial. Mindshare, attention, and privacy costs also need to be considered and a case can be made that the people should not be funding these costs for corporations. Especially with very little oversight or insight into what they are paying for.

Maybe what you need to know, but not how to use the programs. I was very anti Microsoft in my school days but had to learn Excel and Word in school. It helped me so much in my first job.

If you had learned OpenOffice calc or write, would that have made much of a difference? Takes a few hours to move 80% from one to the other. Maybe if very specific functions it may take a few minutes more.

Would you prefer we mandate Vim or EMacs for kids? Both are free, so it’s a deliberate choice to be made. And how do you suggest we support this decision and their potential inability to use an IDE in the real world?

I guess I'm not working in the real world, because I get to use whatever I want as long as I deliver... And so I use VIM.

I have 25 years of software engineering experience in a dozen languages and vim and the supporting plugin ecosystem cover everything I could ever need.

Modern IDEs are not at all required for success in this industry. They can sometimes even be a crutch.

I still teach people Vim. Some learn other things later but the important thing is they have a fast and free baseline available in every package manager.

If you grew up with emacs and vim there is not so much chance you cannot use an ide in the real world? I mean: vim/emacs are considered harder to use and going to something easier is, well, easier? I am not really sure what you are saying?

Someone who can write elisp macros and have muscle memories for complex actions won’t be bothered with VS or VS code at all.

The other way around however…

I think ed is more user friendly.

Just give the rugrats nano and call it a day.

Nothing really compares to Excel.

(Nothing really compares to Excel in some of its most terrible bugs either).

What does Excel do that something like LibreOffice Calc does not? I'm genuinely curious because I've not run into any issues with the latter that the former would've solved so far.

I realise my comment sounded like I was saying the features of Excel are not comparable. What I really meant was simply that, like MS Word (which I hate with a passion), it's so ubiquitous that guaranteeing compatibility between businesses is often worth a significant amount of dollars in time saved.

Excel has FlashExtract and FlashFill[1]

Excel has COM automation going back to the old days; from many programming languages on Windows you can instantiate "Excel.Application" and then script it as if you were using the GUI - and have the GUI visible and showing you what is happening. Add workbooks, worksheets, select ranges, copy/paste, enter formulae and get their results, apply formatting, etc. Because it plugs into Windows' COM system, you don't need to download an Office SDK or Excel-specific library for your language to use it, any language which can talk to COM can do it, including VBScript, PowerShell, Python with PyWin32, JavaScript/TypeScript, C#, etc.

If you save an Excel document on a SharePoint (Office365) site, then multiple people can open it. When they do that, it's a multiplayer spreadsheet - you see who else has the document open, which cell(s) they are looking at, changes betewen all people are propagated in approximately realtime.

If you save an Excel document on an (Office365) site then Office365 has visibility into it, which means if someone else opens it, @tags you in a comment on a cell, Office365 will pick that up and email it to you for your attention.

Excel documents saved on O365 can be opened in a web browser, in a JavaScript version of Excel which has fewer features but can still join in with the above.

Excel documents saved on O365 are visible in the MSGraph API, for scripting with REST endpoints[2]

People who have been working in Silicon Valley, for FAANG companies, as software developers, pushing us all to the cloud for ten to twenty years, still thinking that Excel vs LibreOffice is a matter of a desktop program showing a grid you can put some numbers in and do sum or average, and whether you can bold or align the text, are experiencing some kind of cognitive dissonance.

Your CRUD app can now be a spreadsheet someone in HR opens, enters an employee code, and a script against the MSGraph API which offboards them, and if it hasn't worked the HR person can @ you in a comment. There goes all your custom CRUD UI, database backend, network connectivity, compiling, deployment, authorization, there's your "no code" or "low code" Excel as frontend for a small business.

Want to script a report for HR to look at? Thinking of downloading a JDK and PDF library for Java and asking for SMTP relay settings? Script MSGraph to make an Excel spreadsheet directly in a folder HR can see. A poor solution for a big business, a quick and relatively easy solution for a small business with an admin and a PowerShell script.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32116088#32129830

[2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/resources/excel?v...

Thank you for the explanations! Other than multiplayer spreadsheet editing this doesn't sound too relevant to students though or what they will be taught.

That’s true in the same way that it’s true of Visual Studio, but how many people really need all that functionality in their job?

I’m sure there are some genuine Excel experts out there doing important work but I’ve got to assume most of what’s being done is formulas, charts and pivot tables.

People won't learn the underlying principles, they will rigidly learn the menu structure of the tool at hand. As such, their time will be wasted learning LibreOffice instead of getting a grip on the latest ribbongate spectacle from MS.

And 90% of people probably could continue to use these.

Schools should not use the non-free products even if Microsoft provided them for free to them (which they did or do), because it is a Trojan Horse into kid's minds in order to create soft dependencies. People who learned to use one office suite are rarely motivated to learn yet another one.

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