"IT is urbanizing, McDonald’s gets it, but Woonsocket doesn’t (yet)"

[Lynn McGuire]

"IT is urbanizing, McDonald’s gets it, but Woonsocket doesn’t (yet)"

https://www.cringely.com/2018/08/08/it-is-urbanizing-mcdonalds-gets-it-but-woonsocket-doesnt-yet/

"My favorite UK TV producer once had to sell his house in Wimbledon and
move to an apartment in Central London just to get his two adult sons to
finally leave home. Now something similar seems to be happening in
American IT. Some people are calling it age discrimination. I’m not sure
I’d go that far, but the strategy is clear: IT is urbanizing — moving to
city centers where the labor force is perceived as being younger and
more agile."

I am not sure that I agree with the Cringe but he does make some sense.
Getting us old programmers (I am 58 and building Windows apps in C++ and
Fortran) to work on cloud apps is tough. Of course, we grew up in the
cloud but we called it mainframes back then.

Lynn

[Richard]

[Please do not mail me a copy of your followup]

Lynn McGuire <lynnmc...@gmail.com> spake the secret code
<pkfi41$q6n$1...@dont-email.me> thusly:

>I am not sure that I agree with the Cringe but he does make some sense.
>Getting us old programmers (I am 58 and building Windows apps in C++ and
>Fortran) to work on cloud apps is tough.

You should try it, it's fun. :-)

I recommend playing with a CRUD app using Django or a big asynchronous
I/O mashup using NodeJS.
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[Lynn McGuire]

On 8/8/2018 3:56 PM, Richard wrote:
> [Please do not mail me a copy of your followup]
>
> Lynn McGuire <lynnmc...@gmail.com> spake the secret code
> <pkfi41$q6n$1...@dont-email.me> thusly:
>
>> I am not sure that I agree with the Cringe but he does make some sense.
>> Getting us old programmers (I am 58 and building Windows apps in C++ and
>> Fortran) to work on cloud apps is tough.
>
> You should try it, it's fun. :-)
>
> I recommend playing with a CRUD app using Django or a big asynchronous
> I/O mashup using NodeJS.

No thanks. I am in the middle of putting an Excel spreadsheet OLE
interface into the middle of my mostly Fortran calculation engine with
700K lines of code. It is going slowly ...

Lynn

[Alf P. Steinbach]

On 09.08.2018 00:35, Lynn McGuire wrote:
> [snip]

> I am in the middle of putting an Excel spreadsheet OLE
> interface into the middle of my mostly Fortran calculation engine with
> 700K lines of code.  It is going slowly ...

I'd just export the spreadsheet data as text.


Cheers!,

- Alf

[Lynn McGuire]

The user requirements are
1. the calculation engine exports data to the spreadsheet
2. the spreadsheet does its magic using the data
3. the calculation engine grabs the results from the spreadsheet

Text files do not work for this.

Lynn

[Scott]

Oh, that reminds me of an old truism: What the user wants seldom has
much to do with what the user needs.

OTOH, there's something to be said for milking a good cash cow when
you find one. So there's that.

[Anton Shepelev]

Scott:

> The user requirements are
> 1. the calculation engine exports data to the spreadsheet
> 2. the spreadsheet does its magic using the data
> 3. the calculation engine grabs the results from the spreadsheet
>
> Text files do not work for this.

Excel can import and export CSV files, so you still can work
in plain text and then either invoke a couple of interop
methods or kindly ask the user in Excel to open and save
into CSV. You can also read Excel spreadsheets as very
quickly using the OLE DB interface, which is called either
Ace or Jet OLE DB. It is a deliverance form the Office
interop hell.

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[woodb...@gmail.com]

I think distributed apps are easier to work on than
alternatives, because they are more structured. In
1990 I worked on my first client/server application.
I was amazed by how well organized it was compared
to the other stuff we were working on.


Brian
Ebenezer Enterprises
http://webEbenezer.net

[Ev. Drikos]

Have you tried saving a tab delimited file with the extension ".xls"?

Here is an oversimplified solution that works in MS Office for Mac (11):
1. Export a tab delimited file with the extension "xls", ie "calc.xls".
2. A user can open this file with a mouse click and then edit it. Each
time you save thought, a dialog box asks you to continue or not.
3. Import the tab delimited file "calc.xls" to your application.

Such a file is displayable with Gedit in Linux or TextEdit in MacOS. Is
there a particular Excel functionality you want but is disabled then?


Regards,
Ev. Drikos