In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
Mark Carter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
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>True story: when I began working for my current employer, there was a
>guy there doing some work with a spreadsheet. He was given two weeks to
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[tale of atrocity and woe]
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>cell formulae. The rationale behind this is that VBA is too hard for
>most people to understand, whereas formulae are easier to understand.
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Well *that* certainly made my morning unpleasant.
I think the point to take away has something to do with maturity
or judgment or one of those other difficult qualities. Some of
this stuff--"formulae are easy to understand", "you don't need
programmers, you just enter what you want the machine to do",
"we'll wage war on terrorists by *becoming* terrorists", "Micro-
soft has spent more on 'security' than any other vendor"--*sounds*
like a useful guide to action. A hard part of our responsibility,
though, is articulating for decision-makers that these superficial
simplificities truly are superficial, and that they lead to
monstrous costs that are hard for "civilians" to anticipate.
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