Poor people with cool ideas who are not hardcore programmers use things like Excel. Just think of the standard professional rate tool for Photographers and publishers, Photo Quote, written using File Maker Pro. And that is not a bad thing as if everyone with a cool idea had to be a highly skilled programmer, many of these either usefull or simply entertaining programs would not exist.

But that doesn’t mean “cool” and innovative programs are written using those tools and boring programs are written in Java, C((++|#)) or Visual Torture. Some of the most innovative and cool programs are. And they are also the ones that run the fastest and most reliable.

Like Owen says, when it comes to real applications that people pay money for and you have to support, there’s nothing like something written in a real programming language with users locked down and you having complete control over handling all the stupid things they can, and will, do!

The excel application could have been vastly improved with a few macros written in the built in imperative language – Visual Basic for Applications. If the people who wrote that little application tried to sell it – they would have run into a lot of problems. Users typing into the wrong cell, possibly overwriting the formula, people clicking on the tab at the bottom – Kerry? Bush? then typing away, corrupting the underlying database. Monkeys code away in C and Java because the other monkeys who are going to use that application are going to do what monkeys do – randomly click on all the wrong places.

Stella: Excel was written in C, I think. But that was back in the early 1980s and it wasn’t actually innovative at the time, being a clone of Visicalc, an interesting program of the 1970s. I did not mean to imply that no interesting software has ever been written in C or that programs from the 1980s weren’t interesting. Only that given how many monkeys are coding away in C and Java in 2004 it is remarkable how little innovation there is.

Great page Ken.

Clearly PHP (or any general purpose programming language) is a stronger tool than Excel for almost any application. However, there is little doubt that any decent business user can put together an Excel spreadsheet with this level of complexity over a short lunch. It still takes a programmer to make PHP work. The power of Excel is that average people can get results. Clearly, with a little more brains and time the application can be made even better. I think both of these points were proven today.

Again, cool page. I have now verified that neither candidate called for strong gun control.

And what language was Excel written in ?

A cursory glance shows the weaknesses of Excel when used to text processing. A search on “proliferation” finds no matches for Kerry, whereas including a period at the end – i.e., “proliferation.” finds five.

Ken’s PHP page does not suffer from this problem, and I would recommend that you point people to that instead.

Inspired, I put up a PHP page that does pretty much the same thing as your Excel file, but doesn’t involve downloading an Excel file. It’ll also give you the context of each word.

http://www.kenkinder.com/debate-analysis/

I can’t trust any spreadsheet that says that the following phrase was spoken by GWB: “What I worry about with the president is that he’s not acknowledging what’s on the ground. He’s not acknowledging the realities of North Korea, he’s not acknowledging the truth of the science of stem cell research or of global warming and other issues. And certainty sometimes can get you in trouble.”

philip- excel analysis is good – but your example is perhaps a case of oversimplification of the use of excel in lieu of java.. pl. count how many applications that the aircraft you fly/ services around the aircraft flying including ground services and logistics can be developed and used by excel type applications.

Cute! Try “nuclear”. Either Bush is afraid of pronouncing it like a yokel, or I just can’t figure out how the transcriber spelled “nuke-yu-lar”