Microsoft proudly announces that Excel can now accept a group of values or things in one cell. For instance you might want to show an item and its price, or a name and address.
Congrats! You’ve accomplished the dream of every paper and ink bookkeeper!
Those 1812 bookkeepers for the Lewis and Clark crew only wished they could show several different items with prices in one cell.
Oops, practically all the cells on this page contain a group of items with their price per item. It was universal in journals.
Well then, Congrats! You’ve achieved the perpetual dream of computer programmers! From the start, programmers have wished for the ability to group things inside a cell!
Oops, this original Hollerith card from the 1890 Census is all cross-column and cross-row categories.
I never understood why anyone would use Excel. It’s designed to frustrate everything you NEED to do with a punch card or ledger. It’s good at holding rows and columns, but it makes normal bookkeeping actions wildly difficult.
Python is especially good at flexible categories, automatically handling groups of all sorts (tuples in Python jargon) as a single variable. You can do the same in C++ with a little less flexibility.
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I hadn’t thought of this before…. The original Hollerith cards were punched with an X-Y pantograph like a mouse, not a typewriter-style keypunch. I’ve often made the point that X-Y visual interfaces came before typewriters, but I didn’t think about the Hollerith setup in this context.
