Friday, October 5, 2018

Simpler Solution

The smartest guy that ever worked for me once told me that the best software engineers were the laziest, because they found smart ways to solve complex problems.  (So weird that he was pleased as punch to be able to write a seven character Sieve of Eratosthenses in 7 characters of APL.  And a member of 4 Sigma.  Mensa is 2 sigmas above the average; 4 Sigma tells it all.  (He had a couple of genetic difficulties that would have made him a subject of the various eugenics programs of the early 20th century.  Me too.)

The number of columns that required moving comma separated lists of firearms into separate columns was really not that many.  Remember guns are not commonly used for mass murder until recently.  Those were quick to do by hand in Excel.

The date issues?  Load a CSV of it into emacs where you can regex searches.  With keyboard macroes this will be easy to fix.

2 comments:

  1. Several times I ask myself, what are you doing. This is what happens when the only programing I have done was Fortran and a weird graphic language for LabView.

    Sieve of Eratothenses: is that Greek or Klingon?

    ReplyDelete
  2. James: A method of computing primes.

    ReplyDelete