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Comment by anthk | Hacker News Reader

When genomics are renamed because of your shitty software covering, it's time to ditch that completely for some truly math/bio specialized software under Guix for reproducible research.

Excel shouldn't be used beyond the needs of an accountant.

Before some notes that the original hackers did actually that on some software like Maxima on top of MacLisp, a Lisp environment had a far better structure for doing specialized software than your 'office' suite mostly used to do paperwork.

If you used an XSL file for a million row census as it happened with the Coronavirus, you deserve to be either computer educated or hire some programmers to properly normalize that into either a MariaDB table or SQLite + some UI on top depending on the needs.

Everything else it's a recipe for a disaster.

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> original hackers did actually that on some software like Maxima on top of MacLisp

The original hackers developed Macsyma on Maclisp.

Project MAC's SYmbolic MAnipulator and Project MAC's lisp.

Maxima is a fork, which was renamed from DOE Macsyma to Maxima in the end 1990s, converted to Common Lisp and published under a GPL license.

Macsyma (-> Computer Algebra) and Excel (Spreadsheet) are two very different applications.

I mean that using software outside from its own boundaries was the original hacker spirit. Yes, I know about Macsyma, I tried it under ITS on Simh.

Similary, Emacs got an apt environment outside of editing code with Org-Mode, ERC-TLS, Mastodon.el, EMMS... by properly modularizing the functions. Excel tries to do it all to fit all users in the same place. A recipe for disasters on serious environments.

Some cores are just better to develop a usable environment. MacLisp was. Today Common Lisp it's more than able to fit almost any niche. Excel with VBA isn't a proper environment for scientific computing, it's too bound for office tasks, paperwork and accounting. Ditto with Access being overused as if it could complete with MariaDB, Oracle... generating even more bugs in software and potential issues and lawsuits, as it happened with the scientific papers. And, no, Libreoffice, even being libre software isn't a solution for serious computing either.

> I mean that using software outside from its own boundaries was the original hacker spirit

then Excel is the ultimate hacker software... ;-)

> Excel with VBA isn't a proper environment for scientific computing

But Excel has a user interface, documentation and help, how to solve various problems. Thus the end result is that lots of people were able to solve their practical problems.

"Common Lisp", in its current popular form, lacks an accessible user interface and more recipes how to solve problems. It's an advanced experts tool. A better tool without a handle.

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