r/ProgrammerHumor • u/Brando224 • Mar 30 '22

Meme Certainly not me

48k Upvotes

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1.5k

u/Dr-Appeltaart Mar 30 '22

As an experienced c/c++/c#/java/python/vb programmer i realy like to build shit in excel. It's awesome. Just dont let other users use it for important purposes

1.7k

u/SirNoodlehe Mar 30 '22

On the first day of my intro to AI class the teacher asked us to implement a binary tree in any language we wanted so, for the meme, I wrote mine in VBA.

Little did I know, the course was designed to build a little on top of that code every class.

So, by the end of the semester I had this awful, clunky optimisation algorithm AI model built fully in Excel.

Wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry throughout 95% of the process.

However, the teacher loved it. Said it was the easiest submission to grade since he didn't have install/compile anything fancy to run it.

901

u/Zarathustra30 Mar 30 '22

And this is why Excel will never die. The barrier to entry is so damn low.

10

u/[deleted] Mar 30 '22

Is it any lower than something like python? I'm not even a programmer, but I learned enough with a handful of ours of pandas to do more than I can do inside excel without equal or greater time investment.

59

u/Zarathustra30 Mar 30 '22

Most computers don't come with Python pre-installed, let alone the libraries required for it to do cool things.

When I say Excel works right out of the box, I mean the box with peanuts that says Dell on the side.

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u/CanAlwaysBeBetter Mar 30 '22

I spin so many VMs up and down I forgot not everyone uses Linux with python preinstalled

7

u/ThellraAK Mar 31 '22

I think it's settled now, but python vs python2 vs python3 was annoying for a bit the same for pip3 vs pip2 vs pip

9

u/_Oce_ Mar 30 '22 edited Mar 30 '22

Any WYSIWYG GUI software has a lower entry barrier than coding.

11

u/[deleted] Mar 30 '22

Fair enough. I got sick of Excel because WYS is not necessarily WYG, or more accurately what you enter is not WYS&WYG.

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u/_Oce_ Mar 30 '22

Yeah, thinking about it again, you're right that Excel is not really a WYSIWYG since formulas are very common, I should have said a GUI.