From: blockedofcourse@foo.invalid   
      
   > Oh dear, another example of ineptness triumphing over technical   
   > goodness.   
      
   There is a mistaken emphasis on usability and deferred error   
   checking -- to make "coding" less difficult for the inept.   
      
   Even in languages that have scoping rules that allow you to   
   be more pedantic in defining identifiers, people choose to   
   ignore them as an expedient.   
      
   "The larger the dictionary, the FEWER the number of misspellings   
   the spell-checker will find!"   
      
   Similarly, laziness in deploying invariants lets errors in   
   *processing* creep into data and persist -- often beyond   
   the point where they COULD have been noticed!   
      
   ("This value can't exist here!  But, once you get PAST this   
   point, the code will treat it as valid data...")   
      
   The worst misuse (IM) of Excel is in place of a database.   
   Yet, people seem terrified to NOT be able to see their data   
   at a glance (really?  can you SPOT an error that would merit   
   its presentation, thusly?)   
      
   [I have encountered datasets maintained in excel (and other spreadsheets)   
   that were horrendously large and impossible to manage.  Yet, offering   
   to restructure the data in a database brings terror to the users...]   
      
   > I repeatedly complain to an R user which is an Excel user via   
   > quotations like so: "languages like PHP and Mathematica are still   
   > heedless to variable misspellings; [. . .] reversing bad design   
   > decisions, is often impossible once there is a community of users. The   
   > shortcomings of Perl, PHP, CSS, JavaScript, etc, are going to persist   
   > [. . .] JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Excel [. . .] having little type   
   > safety" says   
   > Harold Thimbleby, "Heedless programming: ignoring detectable error is   
   > a widespread hazard", "Software: Practice and Experience"   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)