

Ask HN: I use excel to develop code. Is this rational? - galfarragem

While a blogger, I develop and update few lists of ~50 links in HTML. I develop it in excel, it allows for example to alphabetically sort the list and take easy track of items already present. I&#x27;m not a professional programmer but is this rational? Besides excel I use sublime text.
======
jacquesm
If it works for you, by all means, YES! That's the only relevant question to
ask in situations like these.

Changing it to some other platform without a good reason is what would not be
rational. Spreadsheets have their uses and this is one of them.

~~~
galfarragem
Few years ago I heard about some people making architectural projects with MS
Paint. Being a professional in that field, it's hard to consider that rational
but as you say: if it works for them..

~~~
jacquesm
Funny you should say that. I built a house in Canada using a very simple grid
with the framing diagram on it. This was so easy to do that I hit on the idea
of using (no kidding) paint shop pro and I drew the whole thing (all four
sides + interior structures) like that and used that to frame the house and
clad it with OSB. Worked like a charm.

Low tech solutions are at times very effective, I'm pretty sure if I would
have done that design in autocad or some other program that I would have been
able to make pretty 3D views and such but it would have taken a whole lot
longer and the end result (the house) would have been just the same.

------
rjf1990
I'm also not a professional programmer, but I used to do a lot of data
analytics for a large company which required lots of SQL.

I often used excel to track my code and keep it organized. Part of this is
that most of my work was done in excel; the SQL queries were just to get the
data workable. But, so many things would change and it was easy to use the
concatenate features of excel to change variable names, table names, and stuff
like that.

~~~
logn
I am a professional programmer (although not a DBA), and have used excel to
generate SQL scripts. You can often just put all the variable in cells and
then use string concatenate to add in the parts of a SQL script that repeat.
It works well and lets others easily maintain/modify it. These are mostly for
throwaway scripts or one-off analysis tasks.

------
brudgers
A few years ago I was developing against an API...though that's not how I
would have described it then. I copypasted tables from a webpage into Excel
and used Mailmerge in MS Word to generate a bunch of functions [ok, actually
procedures - it was Pascal],

I'm not a professional programmer either, of course. But it worked pretty well
and for a one off exercise was a reasonable way to handle tooling. It's pretty
lightweight.

------
edavis
You're fine. I've seen Excel used for far worse.

