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• What is spreadsheet useful for?

  - by zvrba

  I have been in computer business for 15 years in various roles (sysadmin, developer, researcher), and I have never encountered someone using excel for something more advanced than for formatting tables, or as an ad-hoc database that could have been maintained in a text-file. I had to do heavy data-processing and plotting and for that I used some perl scripts + gnuplot, got tiredof it, and went over to R eventually. 2D spreadsheet just didn't seem well-suited for doing statistical analyses over 5-dimensional datasets (not to mention that it produces UGLY plots). I attempted to use spreadsheet for time-tracking, and found out that I would have better been served by a relational database, so I gave up on using excel for that too. For example, it's important to consistently name tasks, and I needed to find out unique task names in a given column across several sheets (I had one timesheet for each month). How do you make such "query" in a program that essentially evaluates independent cells and has little notion of relations between them? So, what are spreadsheets useful for? Why do they have a bunch of mathematical stuff built into them when, AFAICT, people use them mostly as table formatters or bad substitutes for databases?

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• How do you organize information?

  - by zvrba

  I have a relatively large collection of useful books (paper and electronic), [academic] papers (mostly electronic) and web bookmarks. However, I don't have an overview of the material. Currently I have most of the electronic (PDF/DJVU) material in a single hierarchical folder and use filename search. Two questions. Do you have a similar problem, and how do you deal with it? Can you recommend some software to help with organizing bibliographic information, including web links. Easy editing of hierarchy and tags is a must. I would also like to be able to write own comments for each entry. [With my current scheme, just using the filesystem, does not provide other metadata.] A plugin for emacs would be perfect, but it's not a must. (org-mode MIGHT be adequate).

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• Is OOP hard because it is not natural?

  - by zvrba

  One can often hear that OOP naturally corresponds to the way people think about the world. But I would strongly disagree with this statement: We (or at least I) conceptualize the world in terms of relationships between things we encounter, but the focus of OOP is designing individual classes and their hierarchies. Note that, in everyday life, relationships and actions exist mostly between objects that would have been instances of unrelated classes in OOP. Examples of such relationships are: "my screen is on top of the table"; "I (a human being) am sitting on a chair"; "a car is on the road"; "I am typing on the keyboard"; "the coffee machine boils water", "the text is shown in the terminal window." We think in terms of bivalent (sometimes trivalent, as, for example in, "I gave you flowers") verbs where the verb is the action (relation) that operates on two objects to produce some result/action. The focus is on action, and the two (or three) [grammatical] objects have equal importance. Contrast that with OOP where you first have to find one object (noun) and tell it to perform some action on another object. The way of thinking is shifted from actions/verbs operating on nouns to nouns operating on nouns -- it is as if everything is being said in passive or reflexive voice, e.g., "the text is being shown by the terminal window". Or maybe "the text draws itself on the terminal window". Not only is the focus shifted to nouns, but one of the nouns (let's call it grammatical subject) is given higher "importance" than the other (grammatical object). Thus one must decide whether one will say terminalWindow.show(someText) or someText.show(terminalWindow). But why burden people with such trivial decisions with no operational consequences when one really means show(terminalWindow, someText)? [Consequences are operationally insignificant -- in both cases the text is shown on the terminal window -- but can be very serious in the design of class hierarchies and a "wrong" choice can lead to convoluted and hard to maintain code.] I would therefore argue that the mainstream way of doing OOP (class-based, single-dispatch) is hard because it IS UNNATURAL and does not correspond to how humans think about the world. Generic methods from CLOS are closer to my way of thinking, but, alas, this is not widespread approach. Given these problems, how/why did it happen that the currently mainstream way of doing OOP became so popular? And what, if anything, can be done to dethrone it?

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• Indices instead of pointers in STL containers?

  - by zvrba

  Due to specific requirements [*], I need a singly-linked list implementation that uses integer indices instead of pointers to link nodes. The indices are always interpreted with respect to a vector containing the list nodes. I thought I might achieve this by defining my own allocator, but looking into the gcc's implementation of , they explicitly use pointers for the link fields in the list nodes (i.e., they do not use the pointer type provided by the allocator): struct _List_node_base { _List_node_base* _M_next; ///< Self-explanatory _List_node_base* _M_prev; ///< Self-explanatory ... } (For this purpose, the allocator interface is also deficient in that it does not define a dereference function; "dereferencing" an integer index always needs a pointer to the underlying storage.) Do you know a library of STL-like data structures (i am mostly in need of singly- and doubly-linked list) that use indices (wrt. a base vector) instead of pointers to link nodes? [*] Saving space: the lists will contain many 32-bit integers. With two pointers per node (STL list is doubly-linked), the overhead is 200%, or 400% on 64-bit platform, not counting the overhead of the default allocator.

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