The difference, though, is that if you ever need to do the same kind of plot again on new data it's a one-touch operation – just haul your script back out of source control and run it again – whereas the 20-30 clicks and menu item selections you would have used to do it in Excel will all have to be redone from scratch.
Also, in the case where it's not really simple in Excel, the Excel user will tinker around for ages and eventually manage to get it right, and may not even remember quite how, and would have almost as much trouble doing it again, and yet they will still somehow feel that they got the better of the bargain over the person who wrote a Python script, because it would have taken them more effort to learn Python first.
Programmers are people who reliably recognise both those phenomena as false economies of time...
... whereas Excel users are people who reliably recognise as a false economy the learning of Python and careful writing of a nice reusable script when you weren't ever going to need it again :-)
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regna
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Date: 2014-07-24 08:29 am (UTC)Also, in the case where it's not really simple in Excel, the Excel user will tinker around for ages and eventually manage to get it right, and may not even remember quite how, and would have almost as much trouble doing it again, and yet they will still somehow feel that they got the better of the bargain over the person who wrote a Python script, because it would have taken them more effort to learn Python first.
Programmers are people who reliably recognise both those phenomena as false economies of time...
... whereas Excel users are people who reliably recognise as a false economy the learning of Python and careful writing of a nice reusable script when you weren't ever going to need it again :-)