The Dark Art
85/
I went to Barnes and Noble in Union Square on my way home and found a book called “Professional Excel Development.” I was going to approach Excel like I would any new programming language. Read a book. Build some stuff. Read another book. Build some more stuff, and so on.
But as I read through the book I felt horror as I read about the “professional” solutions to everyday programming problems in a spreadsheet. For example, there was a whole section about constructing a list in such a way that you could know how many items it contained. This sort of problem was totally unique to spreadsheet programming.
Primitive, yet extremely competent in their environment, the spreadsheet hackers, who held various roles in the business, were often drawn into competitive/cooperative struggles with the IT department and agents of the Appocalypse like myself. They were kind of like the wildlings in Game of Thrones. Sometimes we fought over turf. In fact, getting rid of spreadsheets was, in many ways, my whole job.
After reading the book however, I suddenly understood why it was an institutional imperative to get rid of spreadsheets in favor of so-called “enterprise” applications.
These things were dangerous.
I felt it was the kind of thing that would blacken my soul if I did it enough to become good at it. However, I had to admit that for those willing to engage in the dark art, there seemed to be a big productivity advantage in the spreadsheet. I knew I was going to have to ask a lot of questions and to run a lot of experiments and to write a lot of code. And I knew that I did not want to become a professional Excel developer. So I returned to my comfort-zone; object-oriented C#.
I was going to write some simulations and try to get a handle on the right way to invest my money. But the problem with object-oriented languages is that before you begin to do anything, you first have to build the world in which your “anything” takes place. The upside is that you get to build whatever kind of world you want.
In spreadsheet-land you get the world for free. The problem is that it’s a crappy world, as compared with the clean, elegant abstractions of other programming environments. However, if you could live there, you just might avoid some of the horrors of the Screen Wars and the Appocalypse.
If it’s the only world you’ve ever known you might even be happy.
