The icon below was captured from the desktop of a computer running Microsoft Windows XP.
Is this document a Microsoft Office Excel spreadsheet?
Many computer users would say that it is. After all, it has got the little Excel image on it and it even says Microsoft Office Excel right below the name of the file. And if we double-clicked on this file, Excel would start up and open the file.
However, this file is not an Excel spreadsheet. It is a plain text file in a Comma-Separated Values (CSV) format. In fact, the name of the file is not “final”, but “final.csv”. Excel can open this file, but so can thousands of other computer programs.
The computer protects us from this gritty detail by not showing the .csv suffix on the filename and it provides the convenience of automatically using Excel to open the file, rather than asking us what program to use.
Is this somehow a bad thing?
Yes, it is.
A computer user who only works with this sort of interface learns that this sort of file is only for use with Excel. The user becomes accustomed to the computer dictating what the user is able to do with a file.
It is important that users understand that we are able to dictate to the computer what should be done with a file. A CSV file can be viewed and modified using software such as Microsoft Notepad, but this may not occur to a user who is used to being told to use Excel.
Another example is that many computer users have been led to believe that the only way to view a web page is with Internet Explorer, when in fact there are many different web browsers and it is possible to access web pages using other kinds of software as well.
For the majority of computer users, interaction with a computer is limited to clicking on web page hyperlinks, selecting menus, and filling in dialog boxes. The problem with this approach to computing is that it gives the impression that the user is controlled by the computer. The computer interface places limits on what the user can do.
The truth is of course exactly the opposite. It is the computer user who has control and can tell the computer exactly what to do. The standard desktop PC is actually a “universal computing machine”. It can do (almost) anything!
Learning to interact with a computer by writing computer code places users in their rightful position of power.
Computer code also has the huge advantage of providing an accurate record of the tasks that were performed. This serves both as a reminder of what was done and a recipe that allows others to replicate what was done.
For these reasons, this book focuses on computer languages as tools for data management.
Paul Murrell
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