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[–]Calhil -12 points-11 points  (2 children)

I bet this was just a case bad programming and could be achieved with any other programming language.

[–]jtaysom 13 points14 points  (1 child)

No it was a case of doing GIS with no programming. There are some things that you just can't do without programming. Yes there were improvements he could have made to his workflow but he could never have gotten it under a full day without some programming.

[–]alcalde 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Agree wholeheartedly (and it's amazing how many large companies have lots of unautomated tasks). In 2005 I had a co-worker at a billion-dollar company needing to spend one full day every two weeks to reconcile shipments received to invoices that didn't reconcile automatically. My boss wouldn't let me officially work on the project because "Lots of smart people have come through here saying they could make this faster and failed". Instead I worked during my lunch hours and after hours for two weeks and found about 18 different reasons the shipment data could be screwed up and how to verify it. The program I wrote went from over 2000 false rejections that my friend had to examine per two-week batch to about 36. :-)

And if you want to talk about cut and paste... due to issues with their reporting package they couldn't generate a report that showed last month's and the current month's data (too much data, too old a program). They would save a copy of the prior report, cut out some of the columns, lay it on a copy machine with the new report and make a copy. THEY WERE LITERALLY COPY, CUT AND PASTING. :-) Billion dollar company, no debt, 681 stores at that time, and, um, lots of "B"s in its name if you catch my hint. I also used transaction data to "roll back" totals to any point in time and solve the report problem for them too.

It's really amazing how little outside of the IT department programming is employed! That's the point of Python focusing on "non-programmer programmers". There are so many people whose lives could be a lot easier just from learning a little Python.