<@UJBAJNFLK> says:
> End users would thus be se...
# of-end-user-programmingo
ogadaki
08/21/2019, 8:41 AM@Konrad Hinsen says:
End users would thus be seen as life-long learners who advance at their own rhythm, possibly never going all the way to professional.I totally agree with that. And maybe it is not easy to set the frontier on this scale "end-user <-> professionnal". I guess sometime some end-user progrmmers can be more efficient than professionnal ones. Example: I guess I can be considered as a professionnal programmer, but I am sure that there are plenty of end-user programmers that master Excel a lot more than me (side note for me: I guess I have to dig into Excel programming a bit more, for my general culture... 🙂 ).
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Konrad Hinsen
08/21/2019, 10:32 AMI wonder if the end-user <-> professional scale is (or should be) orthogonal to the domain-specific <-> general purpose scale. I see Excel mainly as a domain-specific tool. In my professional environment (scientific computing) it's mainly seen as a problem, because people who are good at Excel tend to use it where it is not appropriate (perhaps the most famous case is the [Reinhart-Rogoff mistake](https://theconversation.com/the-reinhart-rogoff-error-or-how-not-to-excel-at-economics-13646)).
From that point of view, obvious upgrade paths from domain-specific to general would be just as important as those from end-user to professional. Excel users hitting the limits of Excel should not have to unlearn everything and start from scratch. No, I have no idea how to do that!
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Duncan Cragg
08/21/2019, 10:57 AMwhy do you see Excel as domain specific? what domain?
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Konrad Hinsen
08/21/2019, 7:36 PMNumber crunching, on finite datasets.
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Duncan Cragg
08/21/2019, 7:41 PMWell the most common use-case is tables of strings, but I see your point!
Duncan Cragg
08/21/2019, 7:42 PMstrings, then dates
Duncan Cragg
08/21/2019, 7:42 PMI think it's far more domain-independent than you claim
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Konrad Hinsen
08/22/2019, 8:13 AMOK, let's say it's multi-domain. It's definitely not general purpose, in spite of being Turing complete.
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Duncan Cragg
08/22/2019, 9:06 AMWell I'm not sure it's TC. Unless you enable circular calculation.
Duncan Cragg
08/22/2019, 9:07 AMOr use that array selection operator thing
Duncan Cragg
08/22/2019, 9:10 AMIt's not "general purpose" in at least the sense that the grid is a clumsy straitjacket without the ability to spawn new chunks.
Duncan Cragg
08/22/2019, 9:11 AMAnd there's no networking
Duncan Cragg
08/23/2019, 7:59 AMOh, and of course, the clunky grid also prevents you spawning new chunks of formulae you can re-use
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Konrad Hinsen
08/23/2019, 9:45 AM@Duncan Cragg Excel is Turing-complete in a rather non-interesting way: VBA scripting. But for this discussion, all that really matters is that it's not general purpose and yet very well adapted to significant use cases. What I wonder is what Excel experts can easily move on on once they hit the limits of Excel.
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Duncan Cragg
08/23/2019, 7:10 PMYeah, sorry I did veer this away from the original point! 😄
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