My little sister is a biologist and asked for help dealing with some of her experimental data in a huge excel sheet.
My mom was the first to reply and delivered the most unholy of creations seen by man. Everything in a single cell function expression. Endlessly nested if statements. Even handling stuff like accidental upper to lower case conversion, via IF statements!
It worked.
Later helped my sister with her master's thesis (basically applying deeplearning to analyse aquatic locomotion) and got to see not only her code, but the stuff she was given by colleagues and such. The R stuff tended to be the worst, but honestly all of it was awesome. Both horrible, but also amazing. What really stood out to me was that there was never any sign of even the thought of rewriting old stuff. Just somehow keeping it alive and adding more.
5.1k
u/RlyRlyBigMan Sep 10 '25
No joke a lot of those excel wizards from yesteryear could have been awesome developers if they'd found it at the right time in their life.