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30th Anniversary of the (No Good) Spreadsheet
theodp writes "PC Magazine's John C. Dvorak offers his curmudgeonly take on the 30th anniversary of the spreadsheet, which Dvorak blames for elevating once lowly bean counters to the executive suite and enabling them to make some truly horrible decisions. But even if you believe that VisiCalc was the root-of-all-evil, as Dvorak claims, your geek side still has to admire it for the programming tour-de-force that it was, implemented in 32KB memory using the look-Ma-no-multiply-or-divide instruction set of the 1MHz 8-bit 6502 processor that powered the Apple II." On the brighter side, one of my favorite things about Visicalc is the widely repeated story that it was snuck into businesses on Apple machines bought under the guise of word processors, but covertly used for accounting instead.
Of course they already used high level languages in those days - on mainframes. But there just wasn't the program storage space on 6502-based machines in those days. You could create a much smaller and more efficient program in assembler than you could in COBOL or Fortran or something.
We didn't even use a high level language on the PDP11. But Macro11 was a million times better than the crappy 6502 assembler i had to work with back in 81!
Spreadsheets generally annoy me because many programming concepts I'm used to are watered down. I find most of the formula stuff to be a pain. Maybe somewhere out there is some sort of "spreadsheet for smart people" where I can use say python expressions to manipulate a big table of data.
As for spreadsheets leading to bad decisions -- it's really the fault of bad models. Just because you can extrapolate into the future doesn't mean that prediction is worth a darn. The phrase "if this trend continues" usually makes my ass twitch. Shouldn't you first do some check to see if that extrapolation means something?
Use the Firehose to mod down Second Life stories!
Just two points. 1. Wasn't it a spreadsheet model that told NASA that the probability of a piece of insulation foam causing damage to the space shuttle was negligible? Misuse of spreadsheets CAN and has cost lives. 2. Not all that long ago, at my former employer, there were accountants assigned to take standard accounting reports produced by the financial system and key those reports into a spreadsheet. They did not do ANY calculations and never used the sheets for anything. They just copied them -- manually -- into a spreadsheet! And yes it was a Government operation! We thought of them as our own Bartlebys.