Use Appropriate Development Tools
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One of my favorite incidents happened over 10 years ago when computers were much less powerful. An engineer came to me with a financial forecast spread sheet that was taking 4-6 hours to run. After speaking with him about what he was attempting to accomplish, I rewrote his application in FORTRAN (the engineering language of choice at that time) and he was able to do an analysis in 6 seconds! That is not a misprint. This engineer was intimately familiar with spread sheets, his only tool was a hammer, so everything looked like a nail.
Brian Leach
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One of my favorite incidents happened over 10 years ago when computers were much less powerful. An engineer came to me with a financial forecast spread sheet that was taking 4-6 hours to run. After speaking with him about what he was attempting to accomplish, I rewrote his application in FORTRAN (the engineering language of choice at that time) and he was able to do an analysis in 6 seconds! That is not a misprint. This engineer was intimately familiar with spread sheets, his only tool was a hammer, so everything looked like a nail.
Brian Leach
Brian Leach wrote:
This engineer was intimately familiar with spread sheets,
:~ won't touch it. nope. not gonna.
image processing toolkits | batch image processing | blogging
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One of my favorite incidents happened over 10 years ago when computers were much less powerful. An engineer came to me with a financial forecast spread sheet that was taking 4-6 hours to run. After speaking with him about what he was attempting to accomplish, I rewrote his application in FORTRAN (the engineering language of choice at that time) and he was able to do an analysis in 6 seconds! That is not a misprint. This engineer was intimately familiar with spread sheets, his only tool was a hammer, so everything looked like a nail.
Brian Leach
I'm going through the same thing now, inherited a bunch of Excel "reports" to maintain. Oh, the horror! -- modified at 20:29 Monday 5th March, 2007 Oh, and... every tool is a hammer.
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One of my favorite incidents happened over 10 years ago when computers were much less powerful. An engineer came to me with a financial forecast spread sheet that was taking 4-6 hours to run. After speaking with him about what he was attempting to accomplish, I rewrote his application in FORTRAN (the engineering language of choice at that time) and he was able to do an analysis in 6 seconds! That is not a misprint. This engineer was intimately familiar with spread sheets, his only tool was a hammer, so everything looked like a nail.
Brian Leach
VBA/Excel03 still has the same performance penalties over modern languages. >30min to ~1s (timed from button click to completed dialog appeared, so a decent chunk of that second was form loading) X|
-- Rules of thumb should not be taken for the whole hand.