But SQL is OK.
> Of course, that’s not the full set of formulae, because it doesn’t tell you how to make ‘Seedy malt dough’, but that’s just another formula, which consists of flour, water, starter, salt and a multiseed ‘soaker’, where the starter and the soaker are the results of other formulae, which are (finally) made from basic ingredients1. I did consider reaching for the object oriented hammer at this point, but thought that I might be able to do everything I needed without leaving SQL.
There's no way you can do something similar with spreadsheets? The example wasn't in enough detail for me to understand why not. The jump from spreadsheet to SQL seems massive in terms of ease of use.
You can, but the author is using tools that are more familiar to him, and hence more productive for him.
Just like when doing some quick and dirty analysis, some people will reach for Excel, some for R, some for Pandas. None of those people is wrong.
Some people go too far the other way: spend too much time learning new tools, and not enough creating things of value.
In tech/development, it's akin to someone building a system in some obscure language, because they are most productive and the only ones developing it today.. It's likely that system will end up being entirely replaced if the team maintaining it grows.
(To be clear, I'm not saying the Bakery made a bad choice, or what using obscure languages is a bad choice, or that optimising for immediate productivity through familiar - to you - tools is bad.. just that there is lots to think about when building a new system..)
recipe ingredient quantity
Small Seedy Malt Seedy malt dough .61 kg
Large Seedy Malt Seedy malt dough .92 kg
Choose tools that are: (1) right for the project (2) right for the current team (3) right for the future team
(3) might be hard given you don't know who joins later, and the engineers might also not have a say if they're not involved in hiring. But you can generally make decent guesses. The odds of the next baker you higher knowing SQL and emacs? Pretty low... the odds they know Excel? Probably higher.
With that said, this was still fun. I enjoy seeing technology used in interesting ways, even if I don't think it's necessarily the most sustainable way to do something.
Sure, open source makes everything rather accessible from a monetary point of view, but you still have to learn things. I almost feel like in the past there were more attempts at making this accessible to the end user, HyperCard, dbase etc, even just BASIC on your 8-bit machine.
Nowadays? Excel/Google Sheets for the most simple case, probably, but if you have to transfer data from/into there or present it differently? Web sites and GUIs aren't that easy, but it's what the users know.
If your point of interaction with a computer is more bare-bones (eg a BASIC/DOS prompt), solutions feel closer, easier to grasp.
> This makes me wonder what someone with less computer experience would do, ie if you're not a former computer professional.
Humans can understand ratios, write stuff down, plan for the future, etc all without org-mode in emacs, databases, and sometimes without even a calculator.
One doesn't need anything more than a notebook (a paper notebook that is) to do this stuff, but to each his own.
No real comparable open source equivalent for these types of things yet.
The spreadsheet is sort of one of those insane breakthroughs where it really makes programming (functional at that) really easy to grasp. And you can iteratively and intuitively add hundreds of variables and logic gates.
Oh for sure, look at web: we transformed something simple and beautiful like html+css in a complete shit show.
Also, I don't feel like the new programming languages are easier then COBOL or BASIC, quite the contrary. We are making technology more complicated for no reason.
Or at least, at the time we had the very complicated stuff and stuff that simplified complexity. Think about S and SPSS.
Now we have complicated and very complicated. We are giving less creative possibilities to the end user: making them consumers, first of all.
Other example VB6.
For new formulas, yeah, It's hard to input new formulas, even in spreadsheet. The system is somehow complex, you probably need a UI for new formulas too, even if it's in spreadsheet.
It was Bernie Greenberg, who discovered that it was (2). He wrote a version of Emacs in Multics MacLisp, and he wrote his commands in MacLisp in a straightforward fashion. The editor itself was written entirely in Lisp. Multics Emacs proved to be a great success — programming new editing commands was so convenient that even the secretaries in his office started learning how to use it. They used a manual someone had written which showed how to extend Emacs, but didn't say it was a programming. So the secretaries, who believed they couldn't do programming, weren't scared off. They read the manual, discovered they could do useful things and they learned to program.
I would have been ahead of my time if I'd actually gone through with it. These days it seems that the secret is out again with recipes calling for 6+ hour rises. In the town I used to live there is a very successful artisan bakery now.
> Mailman was the Customer Service customer-email processing application for ... four, five years? A long time, anyway. It was written in Emacs. Everyone loved it.
> People still love it. To this very day, I still have to listen to long stories from our non-technical folks about how much they miss Mailman. I'm not shitting you. Last Christmas I was at an Amazon party, some party I have no idea how I got invited to, filled with business people, all of them much prettier and more charming than me and the folks I work with here in the Furnace, the Boiler Room of Amazon. Four young women found out I was in Customer Service, cornered me, and talked for fifteen minutes about how much they missed Mailman and Emacs, and how Arizona (the JSP replacement we'd spent years developing) still just wasn't doing it for them.
It seems he mainly sells at a market.
I also use Python to produce paycheck stubs, do simple business data analysis, and email me leads from our website.
A small tangent: I have recently become frustrated with the limitations of a command line interface (primarily the inability to display charts and graphs), but there is a dearth of solid alternatives. Both web frameworks and GUI frameworks add far too much complexity for a solo amateur developer to quickly iterate to meet a small business' needs.
I would love to have a product that let me produce ugly but practical GUIs in Python without having to learn a big framework like PyQT or Django. EasyGUI comes close, but isn't quite good enough.
For now, I update an HTML file to display graphical output in Python and use a Firefox extension to auto-refresh the page on changes.
That was my reaction too. I have a google sheet for bread that allows for different batch sizes and displays out baking instructions in english. This is what a cell looks like: ="mix "&D3*B$1&" grams of "&C3
I can look at the sheet on my phone when making bread. Sheets also now caches off line.
People keep recommending things like Visual Studio Code, but I am yet to find a way to do it there... Is it even possible?
Programming is still not intuitive (nor enjoyable) for the vast majority of people, and I believe it will stay that way.
I've been following him for some time (met him IRL at a conference in Kiev, Ukraine), and he's generally friendly.
Legacy text based solutions that survived are usually much better designed by people who actually spoke to the users.
I believe Marvin Minskey was quoted in "The Dream Machine":
> Computers may be a bicycle for the mind, but most peoples mental output is zero. 0 * x is still zero!
I don't know if the sign is intentionally this way, or if the middle letter of the first word in the name fell off, leaving behind the short, horizontal mount point, but either way it amuses emacs folks a lot, because it appears to say:
M-x Donuts
Who among us hasn't wanted, at least once, to invoke that mode?
https://nodered.org/ offers a drag and drop environment, although indeed the general public would not understand the nodes ("TCP, mqtt, websocket?"), if they could make it more general it would be "easy" to make branches, which is what an if-else-statement is.
I work at a German IT outsourcing company that builds and runs its own datacenters (but also provides SaaS, ISP services, domains, the whole shenanigans).
We have a central database that was started basically at the same time as the company itself, and now covers asset management, semi-automatic billing, network management (and much more) but is also used to generate configuration for mail servers, web servers, DNS servers, radius, DHCP, etc.
Recently, topics such as revenue forecasts and being useful in compliance audits have become more important.
I like to think that this central database has played a part in the steady growth and success of the company, but it's hard to say without doing controlled experiments (to which leadership would most likely object :D).
Very simple and maybe a bit limited, but quite easily extended with some libraries.
For this flocking to happen, it's going to look more like a spreadsheet, block language (Scratch-esque), or Hypercard type system than a text language. Even there, I don't expect it to become a mainstream activity.
Early on it was highly specialized, but from the 50s-80s it was generally expected that you knew how to maintain your car and would do the basic jobs yourself (oil, tires, maybe even filters). But now? A lot of people now would even call out AAA to change a wheel.
Those are but two of that millions of different jobs that are required for modern society to function.
Probably my favorite programming memory was teaching myself Java as a teenager and building games for my friends and I to play. No responsibility, if they worked...great, if not oh well. It was exhilarating. I do not think programming will ever become a lingua franca, as stated in other places here. I think hobbyist programmers may pop up more and more,or people who know enough to build small tools for themselves (not to scale) and I don't think that's a bad thing.
Maybe he'll be looking to hire another person like himself, moving from tech - I'm sure many (most?) of us have toyed with the idea of becoming a baker, cook, farmer, cabinetmaker, wainwright, shipwright, etc. Blog posts like this certainly don't help!
Familiarity is not knowledge.
I'd even say that technology sets us back because know we're all thinking we're much smarter than we are, I can google any issue I have and find an answer with minor brain usage. I don't need to know how basic orientation skills because I have google maps, etc ...
It's a nice tool for sure, but the only "second nature" we're getting is the "second nature" of googling anything that take us more than 5 seconds of brain time.
I lived without a phone for a few weeks (unwillingly) and I was surprised about how little of my daily life I could still do without frictions.
The only lingua franca I see coming is emojis and memes, not programming languages. That's a nice example of tech worker echo chamber / over optimism / bubble though.
In the future, programming will be more accessible, and potentially be so common and part of the upbringing of children that anyone will be able to program simple things they need.
I also see the counter-argument that this is utopian and people will just get more and more stupid. But one can only hope it is not the case! :)
I know a few people who are really good plumbers, electricians and general contractors. Basically, they can see a problem and have the skills to break it down and then create a solution.
None of them can type very well and barely know how to use the internet but I bet if they focused on learning the basics of computers they would end up being top notch programmers.
> The need is there, my question lies in whether an industry with tight profit margins can afford to pay for such a product.
If it actually saves time and helps fulfill orders quicker, why not?
What I'm speaking of is not 20 years from now, but 500. When we've moved past the banal, when people have assimilated instant communication but have also learned the preciousness of time and the negative long term effects of information overload. In a way, a bit like how we quickly moved past custom ringtones, but on a much grander scale. Programming is relatively novel nowawadays. It won't be in 500 years, it will just be like a hammer.
I think a bootstrapper could pull it off, or a small team of two/three funded by a friendly angel.
Emacs not being usable on mobile is a big problem and biggest roadblock in the path.
Some people enjoy their craft (or don't want to sit at a desk all day), in the past few decades programming became really hyped but it's not some kind of goal everyone should try to attain.
At some point we'll have to stop with that "technology can and will solve everything" mentality.
And I don't see why programming has to be the ubiquitous pipedream over any other field, like philosophy. Of course, the main issue is that everyone is different and only a fraction of people are going to have an interest at all in a given niche.
The majority of people can't even do something that is universally uncontroversially good for them like exercise or stay a healthy weight. So I always thought it was funny to think that we'll all sing kumbaya over something that requires effort but with even less global appeal like programming.
- making money through ads.
- enabling people to live their shallow ego trips on fb / ig / whatever is used these days. (influencers, &c.)
- drown people in endless entertainment to make their work/sleep cycle tolerable.
None of this is helping society is a whole, but, sure we have nice electric cars 90% of the population can't afford and we'll soon send rocket to Mars.
Do we need $2.6k foldable phone ? pizza delivery drones ? same day delivery ? slaves delivering food through apps like deliveroo ? Is that the best we can do with tech today ? Or is it just enabling our mindless consume / produce cycle with no end goal ? For every meaningful tech advance we have 10 startups raising millions to press a fruit bag [0] or be a rental agency [1]. It's like a sad and lame black mirror episode.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/01/juicero-s...
1. Generally her inventory increases in value over time because it grows. Over time a plant will grow from a smaller pot to a larger pot, plants in large pots sell for more. 2. She wants to track which suppliers provide better quality plants (do the plants die quickly?). She also wants to track how fast different plants grow.
I could pretty easily write a django app that tracks this stuff.
Any recommendations for a platform I could build on top of (airtable? google forms+sheets?). Maybe some type of marketing automation platform.
Custom business apps are tricky. As a programmer it's easy to turn my nose up at excel based solutions, but I totally see how they end up being built.
It may trend that way for programmers. There's always the time-trusted argument to use a technology that "everyone else knows because maintainability," and often that's going to mean javascript (or whatever language the squeaky wheel likes the best).
But for the general population? I doubt it. We were told, 30 years ago, that everyone needed to learn how to program computers to compete in the economy of the future. That future is here and the majority of people I know aren't interested in learning how to program and don't need to.
Both of these are true. And most people do not appreciate how tricky niche apps are. When I started writing PartsBox (for myself initially, later grew it into a business at https://partsbox.io/) several years ago, I thought I'd be done in a weekend. Nearly 4 years and almost 3000 commits later…
Spreadsheets are a pain for anything but the simplest things. And yet they are useful to a point, because making a domain-specific application is surprisingly hard: there are lots of edge cases that you don't think about initially.
When I say afford to pay, I'm thinking of all the development time that has to go into it to make a viable product. I do believe it is possible and honestly hope to be the person to do it. Even if I'm not, I hope someone does because there is plenty of potential beyond what I'm trying to do.
Who said anything about being a great programmer? We have great writers, and believe me I'm not one, it doesn't stop all of us from gaining quite a bit from writing.
I'm not a native English speaker, I talk french. I'm far from great in linguistic, I'm not even great in English (my accent is atrocious and I require quite a bit of pause when I speak). Yet here we are and we both profit from me using that skill with you.
My sister has a criminology degree and one of her required class was SQL. She isn't a great programmer, yet she was able to use that skill to do more.
Personally I'm pretty sure programming should/will become a basic skill everyone will have. It doesn't means everyone will be great at it, it doesn't means it will fill every needs, but I believe almost everyone can gain from it. How many time have we used algebra in our daily life, I can count it without any hands for pretty nearly everyone ;) yet we all learn it. There so many time though that I saw people do repetitive tasks, that could be automated so easily on a computer, yet we don't learn that at school.
Not everyone will become full time programmer, but almost everyone can profit from that skill.
In 10 years, Javascript will be as old and forgotten as Perl or (classic) ASP.
And you are right about the rising time. I do an 8 hour rise. Doctor Carrie Reams said that the rising time breaks down the phytates which in turn releases the calcium into a form that the body can digest. 2 hour rise doesn't do that.
"There was once a programmer who was attached to the court of the warlord of Wu. The warlord asked the programmer: "Which is easier to design: an accounting package or an operating system?"
"An operating system," replied the programmer.
The warlord uttered an exclamation of disbelief. "Surely an accounting package is trivial next to the complexity of an operating system," he said.
"Not so," said the programmer, "When designing an accounting package, the programmer operates as a mediator between people having different ideas: how it must operate, how its reports must appear, and how it must conform to the tax laws. By contrast, an operating system is not limited by outside appearances. When designing an operating system, the programmer seeks the simplest harmony between machine and ideas. This is why an operating system is easier to design."
The warlord of Wu nodded and smiled. "That is all good and well, but which is easier to debug?"
The programmer made no reply."
This is what I'd imagine most of the people on here would fall into the trap of when the monthly 'I want to quit and work with my hands' post comes up. It's the cliche, I want to disrupt the industry before I even learn it.
My girlfriend works at a bakery and I showed her this post and asked her what she thought about it. None of the bakers need to write down anything or make spreadsheets on how to make a loaf of bread or any of the other products they make every day. This is like having to google 'how to write a for loop' even though you're a programmer.
Bakeries make the same things every day, there's very little change even though as a customer(me) it might look crazy. Knowing recipes and quantities and how to adjust them are the most basic requirements of the job.
Huge props to this guy for doing it though! I hate making negative posts shitting on someones venture. If this is what makes it more fun for him, then keep doing it, and get better.
Once I start the mixes, everything runs from paper though.
Maybe somewhere a long way down the line I’ll make an Alexa skill, but it’s not a priority.
(Also, Org Mode beats the crap out of Anaconda/Jupyter notebooks. You can still code Python, but the interface is actually ergonomic.)
A bakery formula is an acyclic directed graph running from top level “product” nodes (a loaf of bread, say) through one or more intermediate formulae until you reach basic ingredients. For a given set of orders, you need to work out how much of which ingredient to mix at each step in the process. If I were only working in, say six loaf batches, it’d probably be easier to use a ready reckoner approach, but it’s a tiny bakery and I’d rather not deal with the wastage so I only bake what’s ordered.
After about the third time I fucked up the pencil and paper calculations, I decided to automate (then at least the bad calculations were repeatable, and only needed fixing once).
In principle you could add special Android bindings for emacs which would make using it without a keyboard somewhat useful.
If you're doing anything complicated you have to wrangle the vehicle computer.
I expect you're right, computers will get more complex, more proprietary, less open, less likely to use open standards, companies will do more to prevent users adapting or repairing them.
The app had no import/export, but it turned out you could save your work in progress to a proprietary file format. I figured out the format, and then figured out how to basically take the data in google sheets and munge it into the save file format.
It took about 3 hours to enter all the grades manually, and it took about 3 hours to develop the app. So for the first time we used it, it was a wash, but then we got to use it twice more.
Sadly, then they changed report card programs and the new one used a binary file format. At least the new program allowed keyboard input with shortcuts, so it wasn't as a bad.
> Use the too, you’re comfortable in and you’ll be way more productive than dropping everything to learn something new.
That's not true, and this kind of thinking can be dangerous to your productivity - especially if the tool you're comfortable in is one of the new breeds of popular applications or SaaS. Each tool has a productivity ceiling. Software like Emacs or Vim has that ceiling somewhere in the stratosphere; a typical web-based tool has the ceiling ridiculously low, barely letting you stand up. On that spectrum, dropping everything and learning a tool that gives you more space to grow does pay off very quickly.
Edit: I should clarify that when I say "small(ish)," I'm referring to the number of discretely moving pieces and dependencies, not to, e.g., the size of a binary, or how many batteries are included, etc.
But today, my customers want 9 large multigrain loaves, 4 small ones, 3 really small soup bowl loaves, a dozen large white sours, 5 small and a couple of dozen bun loaves. On Friday they will want substantially different quantities. If I want to keep selling 95–100% of everything I bake, then I need accurate quantities, and I’d rather offload that essentially trivial calculation on a tool that gets it right every time. Five minutes after I arrive in the bakehouse, I have an accurate production sheet with the right quantities on it and I can concentrate on the far more important task of actually making the bread. I’ve spent maybe a couple of days, over the last year and a bit implementing the production planning software. Time well spent, I reckon.
There is definitely a lack of good baking software in the industry. all the spreadsheets I saw when I worked were overly complicated and error-prone. Maybe one day I can expand on the app and work with some bakers on it :)
There's a reason why they didn't be come a plumber.
There's a reason why they didn't become a programmer.
I think this thread greatly overestimates people's desire to do things themselves rather than just consume the products of other people's labor. There are a million things in my own life that I could do but don't.
Mobileorg was that app for a while but it's development stopped and it's no longer usable.
It's mostly breaking down problems, having a general curiosity on how things work and being able to read documentation. The only real difference between an electrician and a programmer is the context of how they apply those skills.
Odds that you can teach them the basics of SQL and Emacs? Pretty high. At the level needed here, it's just UI like any other. Journalists are routinely taught SQL as a part of their studies, and secretaries and writers are known to use Emacs.
As for your points for tech projects, I really dislike the emphasis on (3). It sounds reasonable from business perspective, but business is always hoping for candidates who already know everything they need to be 100% productive from day one. It's an impossibility, and structuring your workshop around such requirements only drags your project down - because instead of using the right tool for the job, you end up using the lowest common denominator tool.
It's kind of like refusing to use excavators, because not everyone knows how to operate them, but everyone knows how to use a shovel and shovel wielders are cheaper.
The feature I like most about excel, is that it is practically ubiquitous. If I give someone else an excel toy workbook that does something, they can run it without needing to "manage the environment". If I write something in Python/numpy/pandas/Jupyter, it is actually pretty difficult to make it useful to anyone. Portability just makes the whole hobby programming thing much more fun.
The reputation of user unfriendliness is undue, and based mostly on looking at how pros work with it.
Here's a short intro: https://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/org-spreadsheet-intro....
Here's some documentation: https://orgmode.org/manual/The-Spreadsheet.html
And if you feel that TBLFMs are getting unwieldy, here's a bunch of features I absolutely love: https://orgmode.org/manual/Advanced-features.html. Turning on an extra column lets you name columns and cells, and have Org Mode recalculate the table automatically on any change, instead of on explicit command.
> Odds that you can teach them the basics of SQL and Emacs? Pretty high.
Have you ever tried to teach a regular person how to use Excel? The above reads like satire if I'm honest. Even teaching someone how to use Emacs alone would be seriously pushing it.
That's one of many hidden strengths of Emacs-based workflow - it works the same whether you're running in GUI mode, or connecting remotely with text terminal. That also means I can work on heavy projects from my underpowered 2-in-1 netbook :).
That said, in context of work, it's even simpler. A few tasks, a program. You teach people by example. Type this here, type this there, do this, do that, you're done. Nothing hard.
Think of it this way: almost every company that uses computers has some custom assortment of SMB tools and SaaS websites specific to the job at hand. It's normal that people learn this, and they have zero problems with it. Hell, typical ecommerce management panels I see people working in have UX an order of magnitude worse than Emacs.
Though I'm beginning to wonder if JavaScript-based extensions in VS Code can match the power of Emacs code. Are there plugins that connect to Postgres? or do what Org-mode does?
You pay your admin $18/hr and pay a programmer $50. People tend to assume their place.
We're inspired heavily by Excel and visual programming. The idea is that business apps — even custom ones — all have the same building blocks for their front-ends: tables, buttons, dropdowns, textinputs, etc. And so we give you all of these building blocks, as components that you can use.
And most custom business apps interface with SQL databases or APIs, so we have native integrations with those. If you want to render a list of users in your app, for example, you could write the SQL query (`select * from users`), and save it as `users_query`. Then, you can drag on a `Table`, and have its `data` property set to `{{users_query.data}}`. Then you're done!
This probably all sounds a bit abstract... so here's a 3 minute demo video, if you're curious: https://vimeo.com/303811211
Let me know if you'd be interested in trying it? I'm at david@tryretool.com if you have any questions / feedback! :)
I agree the LISP thing would be a deal break for a lot of people.
I don't know if he keeps spreadsheets or even databases elsewhere -- I hope he does, as he's an amazing baker and works his butt off, and I hope he makes tons of money. But I really don't think he has any record of, say, whether Rye or Spelt sells out faster. (It all sells out every day.)
So I wonder if there's some level of artistry where optimization might just be an annoying distraction.
But more specifically, science! We used IVF.
I'm so glad to see other people think of recipes this way. I have so much trouble keeping track of what's going on in a complicated recipe because of the linear way it's written. I have good results rewriting them as a DAG on an index card (or the back of the recipe card) and just following that instead of the recipe.
If someone can't even type well, that alone adds what, 80-120 hours minimum of learning just the basic skill alone to get to a level where they can focus on programming without having to focus on input. Specialization exists for a reason, there just isn't the time to learn everything. And the time investment to learn a trade is ~equivalent to the amount of time to learn to program.
Maybe that argument could apply to typing, but I'm not sure that even the ability to use a keyboard will be that kind of universal required skill in my lifetime.
Everything is about will + tools + problem solving skills. From building a house to fixing a bicycle, building a shelf, fixing an old SLR, &c. I'd even argue that building/fixing material things is more rewarding than programming in general.
The only difference is that current society chose to reward average developers much more than average workers in other industries (good pay, flexible working hours, free snack, job security, &c.). But to me the average developer is not more important than the average trashman or electrician, quite the opposite.
A lot of tech workers are not much more than assembly line workers from back in days, spitting out barely maintainable code found on stack overflow, using tools they understand only on a superficial level (framework, DBs, &c.).
Again, familiarity is not knowledge. We have to stop romanticising our profession as if it was some kind of holy grail, for most people it's just a (good) way to bring money home. Most developers are not revolutionising anything, most are not working on anything meaningful, most are easily replaceable, most don't care that much about what they do, just like everywhere else.
The company's official ERP in which we report our monthly activities is a horrendously slow and error-prone old-school GUI, where you basically punch a lot of numeric codes that represent customers and activities, and that can be pretty hard to get right. It looks like a spreadsheet with delays of several seconds after each cell is filled-in, because the apps commits everything over the network each time. I would waste several hours of life every month, typing one piece of rubbish at a time into that sad thing. It's a lot of pain and a colleague had written an automation tool based on the ERP's binary formats. However, his tool needed the code to be adjusted to each user, then compiling his thing was no easy task, then you needed to ask for special permissions to be able to feed the ERP with the binaries, and at last you realized that the binary output was a fragile thing, and so nobody used the tool.
So I wrote an automation script in Python with pluggable input sources which can be combined (text files that are easy to read and write, http connection to Redmine activities... later on a colleague took the tool and added a GrindStone source, and another guy plugged it into his Outlook calendar). The output stage to the ERP is built upon PyWinAuto, and it just simulates key-strokes on the proper window. It is not smart. It remains constrained by the ERP's slowness. But IT IS A HELL OF A FUN TO WATCH your monthly torture getting done all by itself, and enjoying a walk with a coffee in hand for that time, coming back from time to time to see your screen doing stuff.
All in all it took me about a whole day to write the script. It has been running for four years now. One ERP update broke the output stage. Fixing it was a matter of minutes : just write down the new keystrokes.
I pay $X,XXX a year for manufacturing software, and I just had to write software like OP for my own company.
The software I buy can turn product demand into ingredients and orders. But it can’t do it into the future. So I had to write custom software to take a sales forecast, turn it into a production forecast, and then turn this into a purchasing forecast. Seems like something that should be a solved problem, but not really.
