
Why a simple spreadsheet spread like wildfire - ikeboy
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/03/visicalc-software-first-killer-app-john-naughton
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dang
_I was teaching mathematics to complete beginners, and finding that while they
were fine with arithmetic, algebra completely eluded them. The moment one said
“let x be the number of apples”, their eyes would glaze and one knew they were
lost. But the same people had no problem entering a number into a spreadsheet
cell labelled “Number of apples”, happily changing it at will and observing
the ensuing results_

This is one secret of the mass accessibility of spreadsheets: they don't
require abstraction—you build a concrete working example, then tweak it. This
differs from other programming environments—even the simplest scripting
languages—which require you to build abstractions first and only later
instantiate them. That is a high cognitive hurdle.

~~~
zzalpha
Indeed. Ultimately a spreadsheet is a REPL for a functional programming
language. Makes you wonder why we worry so much about teaching everyone to
code when the average office admin does it every day!

~~~
kuschku
Well, a Reactive Functional programming language.

Everything is mutable by default, but changing one variable automatically
updates all dependents.

This style is also getting more popular elsewhere, and with RxJava and
RxAndroid nowadays you can even use it on android.

~~~
blendo
What, and give up Excel/VBA? More seriously, an F# IDE baked into Excel would
lead to spontaneous Snoopy-dancing in the finance IT trenches.

~~~
eru
We've had a Haskell-clone baked into Spreadsheets at Standard Chartered Bank
for a while.

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ohjeez
Visicalc was the software that caused the term "killer app" to be _coined_.
...And I'm such an old fart that I remember it.

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Animats
The amazing thing is that the expression format set by VisiCalc ("A1:A9") is
still in use.

~~~
mturmon
Hmm, the place I got that from was Matlab, but VisiCalc (1979) predates Matlab
(1984).

I wonder if the colon idiom for matrix indexing was in use before 1979?

~~~
toadkicker
Yes it comes from statistical mathematics

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danso
How much did spreadsheets influence how we think about the structure of data?
I know (well, I read in Wikipedia) that RDBs were proposed in 1970, but
probably weren't in popular consumer use by the time VisiCalc came out. While
row-column can't perfectly encapsulate objects and attributes in our world,
they do a good enough job that I wonder if they compelled us to think in flat
tables?

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cm2187
Flat tables have been in engineering for decades before computers. It's just
the only way to present clearly data.

~~~
JadeNB
> It's just the only way to present clearly data.

If not anywhere else, then surely on a _hacker_ news site, one would expect
not to see a statement of the form "this way that things have always been done
is the only way to do it" (especially if 'it' is a subjective thing like
presenting data clearly; think about the totally changing UI paradigms that
could authoritatively have been predicted to be impossible before the
widespread availability of touch-based interaction).

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peter303
Why Bricklin didnt patent the spreadsheet:
[http://www.bricklin.com/patenting.htm](http://www.bricklin.com/patenting.htm)

I think they could have patented the business method, not the code then.

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moron4hire
It's nothing in the brain, it's completely social conditioning. You can
retrain yourself if you put enough effort into it.

~~~
iheartmemcache
Social conditioning or not, brain malleability decreases rapidly after 25.
Neuroplasticity is no longer what it was, and the quicker one reconciles
themselves to that fact the quicker they can figure out what they both excel
at and enjoy. There's tons of things that are just _in the brain_. I come from
a family of academics where every male in my family was either a PhD or an MD
except for my paternal grandfather. Most of them are of Oxbridge pedigree,
ranging from post-docs with Nobel Laureates to tenured faculty at those East-
coast liberal schools Ann Coulter hates so much. Math came ridiculously easy
to me, nature or nurture I'm not sure. Then I started going to conferences and
seeing people who were of Terrance Tao caliber. No matter how hard I train,
I'll never win a Fields medal. My brain is no longer malleable. One of the
reasons I went into industry instead of academia was meeting people 20 year
old first year grad students who were of one subset of mathematics, take 4
months to sit down and study an entirely different subset and start
collaborating, then outperforming post-docs who've spent ~10 years on it. I'm
convinced we all have more or less the same ability to perform at that level,
just in different fields. Most of us will never be able to out-return Andre
Agassi, but they might just be _naturally_ [I use this term loosely since we
know so little about the neurological methodologies by which we acquire and
integrate knowledge, problem solve, etc we can't quantify what differentiates
one's propensity for a skillset from anothers] great at poker, tearing down an
engine in 20 minutes, or precision pilotry.

~~~
moron4hire
None of this is considered hard fact. There are studies that support what you
say and there are studies that completely dispute it. And neither have been
replicated with very much success. However, if you are correct, it would
suggest our modern efforts at treating stroke victims are a complete waste of
time and effort, a statement I think the patients and their families post-
treatment would find puzzling.

People who have early success within an area of study will tend to think of
themselves as a natural and will put in more practice time than a person who
has not had early success. People who had early failures will continue to see
themselves as "struggling" at the subject, regardless of their actual skill
level. The only advantage the "natural" has is that this emotional response to
the subject makes it easier to decide to practice: people of equal practice
level are almost always equally skilled, even in opposition to their
subjective self-evaluation, barring general mental deficiency.

There's no "math" gene. There's no "art" gene. There's only intelligence and
it can be applied to any subject. The idea that people's neuroplasticity
somehow "hardens" in the mid-20s or whatever is just an excuse that people
make for themselves for why they bought an electric guitar but then never
practiced at it. When you're a kid, you don't have a lot of different concerns
competing for your time. When you're an adult, it's easy to put off a new
subject when you can be productive doing something else. It's completely
social.

