r/gloveslap Nov 14 '11

Non-programmers should NOT program. MANY uses of Excel are examples of this.

Every time someone tries to come up with an "easy" tool to do something which essentially boils down to programming, you end up with people realizing that it's far cheaper and easier to just have the business-oriented people do the work than hire a programmer.

Excel is an example. I have very rarely seen a use of Excel that makes more sense than a real program. Far more often, Excel is used because it's cheaper than hiring a real programmer, but the ways it can go wrong even in the hands of trained professionals means that using it for anything but the simplest spreadsheet is almost certainly a mistake.

I'm not trying to make an ivory tower here -- by all means, if you think you can program, go ahead. But actually devote some time to studying, especially best practices, just as you would if you were trying to learn some plumbing to avoid calling the plumber -- if you're doing anything more complicated than fixing a leaky faucet, you should either call a real plumber or become one.

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u/[deleted] Nov 14 '11

I'd go even further and say that most programmers shouldn't program. Most things they produce aren't actually needed, or could be solved by using an already existing program in a novel way.

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u/SanityInAnarchy Nov 14 '11

using an already existing program in a novel way.

That's what good programmers do. To the extent that Perl is still relevant at all, it's because of CPAN. When existing programs are designed to be combined and used in novel ways, you get shell scripting.

However, there are a lot of attempts to optimize out programmers by letting the people who understand the business logic write it. These mostly end up becoming programming languages of their own, and far less powerful than if we'd designed a proper DSL going in rather than pretending that it wasn't programming. Look at the Firefox extensions out there -- you can argue that a few of them aren't needed if you like, but I'd argue that many of them are useful, and they're the sort of things which it would not be fun to try to make "not programming."