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Comment by gaius | Hacker News Reader

Dev time, you say. Well let me tell you a story. I am quite into 8-bit, I like buying micros from the 80s as junk and fixing them up. Recently, my old lady and I wanted a spreadsheet to track days off, vacations and so on. I could have done it on the quad-core, 8G Mac in Excel or online with Google Docs... But I actually did it in ViewSheet on a BBC Micro.

So dev time, well the last THIRTY YEARS of dev time haven't gotten me any anything I didn't have already.

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I would personally not put up with a spreadsheet where the GOTO cell function is rather awkardly hidden on function key number seven.

And today I walked a mile from my grandmother's to my house. The last HUNDRED YEARS of car manufacturing haven't gotten me any anything I didn't have already.

A car could get you there faster, or dryer in the rain, or carrying more stuff. But there's not much Excel can do for the vast majority of users who just want a table with a few dozen records, that ViewSheet (or the granddaddy of them all VisiCalc) can't. Same with wordprocessing.

Except many of those users don't want just a table with a few dozen records - they want that plus a couple of small features. And the real problem is that they don't want the same couple of features. Hence, you end up with huge beasts to support each combination.

For example, what if you want to use your spreadsheet when you're not home? Never happened to you? Well, it happened to others.

People should simply design something small that satisfies a niche. If it doesn't have enough features for some person, rewrite it. When software is small you can rewrite as much as you want. Software engineers labour in the delusion that their creations are so fantastic and amazing that it can only accomplished through huge complexity.

ViewSheet delivered a basic spreadsheet + sample code in BBC Basic to manipulate it. It could do anything Excel + VBA can do today.

Yes, as long as you can code; but in that case, so can raw assembly. Most people can't code, so that doesn't help them if they want something more. Excel, on the other hand, has features they can actually use.

Or to use my previous analogy, you're essentially saying that because you can build your own custom designed car from parts, pre-built cars are useless.

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