Saleh Kayyali on Spreadsheet UI Design

This is interesting.

See his web site https://mskayyali.com/.

8:00 On transparency. The thing is it becomes a lot like open source. You have the option to read the logic, but seldom have the time to actually do it, and when you realise just how much time it would actually take to manually verify a large spreadsheet then you realise that you would be better off just recreating it from the raw data. So that tells you what a spreadsheet should do. It should just show the raw data and the steps like "sum the columns with these headings and put the totals here" then you would be able to really see the underlying logic and know it to be good. But putting the cursor individually on each and every cell and verifying the formulas which all look like =g$2 + f$2 (but often much more complex)? Nobody does that!

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As part of his course Write your own tiny programming system(s)!, Tomas Petricek did a video about Excel a month ago:

7:09 What did you do there? This is why spreadsheets are a bad idea. When you "pull" a row or column to replicate it, you really want that action to be the semantic content of the new cells, but it isn't because you can just modify the cell formulae later. So when you receive a spreadsheet closing out a hundred billion dollar hedge fund investment deal then you should really manually check every single formula to see that it is in fact correct. But who has the patience of the focus of attention to do that? Now Google "Bill and Melinda Gates Excel International Monetary Fund" and "Argentina Dollar Bond" .... 

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Damian Soriano on Standard Chartered's efforts to create declarative functionsl User Interface specification language. 

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I despair. It's as if all these people are paid to be fucking stupid! See Brazil. 

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