Hell, R was being used in colleges in 2000. Unfortunately, whether it was SPSS for the soft sciences or forcing stats work in Matlab for the engineers, professors always seemed bad at promoting the right tool for the job.

R is great. Your boss will give you excel.

Not sure if the post is about GUI vs non-GUI. I read it as use R or pandas instead if SPSS.

I agree. I learned a lot of bioinformatics stuff from the ground up, because I was learning python at the time, and found it super useful as practice. Years later, I discovered https://rosalind.info/ and cursed the fact that I hadn't had access to that when I was learning.

I heard its good for databases...

My high school IT teacher said this outright. He was a FOSS guy, but he said employers will expect MS Office, so we're going to be learning that.

Funnily enough proprietary software is frowned upon in my professional domain. Im not mad though, the excel commands and whatnot still work in libre office spreadsheets.

Unrelatedly, doing statistics in a spreadsheet program sounds like absolute hell.

"Sometimes Excel is what's available."

I worked for a Big Company that was cutting back and dropped their Oracle contracts, forcing all the DBAs to work in Access. Then they fired all the DBAs, forcing everyone to either try to figure out Access or switch to Excel. Guess which way they went.

In my last job at that company, my department had built an Excel spreadsheet (database) so large and full of calculations they had to request money to update our machines to 64-bit Windows and 16GB RAM just to run it.

we aren't in college to learn a specific skill so much as we are there to learn how to be taught.

I really like this idea, but prefer one small change: I think it's best to learn how to learn.

Learning how to be taught is part of that, and a large part. Understanding when to absorb information, rely on experts, and apply yourself until you improve is fundamental. You won't get any arguments from me there.

But being taught is only one facet of learning. Sometimes experts aren't really experts, or don't have the learner's best interests at heart, or omit things to protect their own interests or ideology.

Learning how to learn involves fostering fundamental curiosity, not being afraid to fail, asking all the questions even dumb ones or those with seemingly obvious answers. Finding out "why" something works instead of just "how". Fundamentally curious people who learn as a habit tend to also develop a scientific method-like approach to evaluating incoming information: "Ok, this is the information I'm presented with, let's assume the opposite, can I prove the null hypothesis?" This acts as a pretty good bullshit detector, or at the very least trains learners to be skeptical, to trust but verify, which is enormously important in the age of misinformation.

Being taught generally tapers off as someone gets older, or becomes an expert. Learning never needs to taper off, so long as your brain still works.

https://www.visidata.org/

Blows Excel out of the water, and it's not even close. And it's free, open source, and completely extensible (with Python, not some godforsaken excuse for a programming language).

For most of us, we aren’t in college to learn a specific skill so much as we are there to learn how to be taught. To prove we are capable of taking instructions and producing results as requested.

This is true to the extent that you won't be solving Organic Chemistry 1 or Linear Algebra exercises at your workplace, but I think it's misleading. If anything, from my experience, people focus too much on producing the results and not enough on learning the skills. A lot of people stay on the mindset of "I only need the degree / where am I going to need that / the industry has moved on from this" and don't build strong foundations

Lemmy Silver™🥈 incoming !

Learning to learn is what the 12 years of babysitting we all go through is supposed to be doing. The fact you overlook that is why we have a >50% illiteracy rate in the USA. Post secondary education is 100% about learning advanced skills and developing the techniques needed for a career. Saying otherwise is why companies are looking for doctoral degrees for entry level positions and they can all burn in hell.

It is extremely common for classes to require students to learn to use proprietary software. It's a tool of the trade. If they graduate you without teaching you how to use it, they'd be fucking you over and ruining their own reputation. Like, imagine an accounting student graduating not knowing excel, because they did all their assignments using MatLab because they liked it better. It would be absolutely unthinkable for any potential employer to hire such a student. Excel is the software they use in that field. If a student wants to learn a different option in their free time, that's fine and dandy.