Will’s Tiffs: You Can’t Make Me

​Few things are more frustrating than when your program of choice decides to change some fundamental function – thereby forcing you to grow and adapt.  Sometimes this is a blessing in disguise, because it’s important to keep learning and realize that most things in life are dynamic, but sometimes it’s still stupid.  Here’s a list of programs that made it to the top of my tiff list this week.

​Adobe Dreamweaver CC

​The Creative Cloud has always been teetering on the edge of “I like this” and “I don’t like this.”  Well Adobe, you’re teetering in the wrong direction.  Once again, I’m late to the game – so I’m probably not one to talk, but getting rid of aspx support for Dreamweaver just wasted 30 minutes of my day, after watching a few tutorials about adding SQL database connections through Dreamweaver.  Harrumph.  Now the search begins for a better solution…

​RStudio

​R – You didn’t change a thing.  But you probably should.  Why is working with strings so counter intuitive in R?  Take the simple example of having two strings: “disorganized” and “program”.  Let’s say I want to put the two together to make the single word “disorganizedprogram”.  This is usually referred to as concatenation, joining, merging, and adding strings.   None of these commands exists.  In my mind, the logical approach is to take:

'disorganized' + 'program'

​But no.  Definitely not.  Instead, R uses the command “paste” to join strings together.  Trust me, there are some really great aspects of R, but this seems ridiculous.  Oh, and you need options.  The R syntax to make this solution would be:

paste('disorganized', 'program', sep='') 

​Looking back, I’ll probably wonder why this even bothered me in the first place, but I believe it’s important to keep things simple, so they’re easily passed on to others.  The paste legacy should go away.

​AppleScript

​You removed Visual Basic from AppleScripts, Apple... a while ago (again, I said I’m usually behind on these topics), but you removed it nonetheless.  Why can’t you get along with Microsoft?  If not for the sake of excel automation.

Now all do Visual Basic commands are dead.  Luckily, macros may still be run from AppleScript, but that means that the macros have to already exist.

tell application "Microsoft Excel"
        activate
        run VB macro "MyMacro"
end tell

​I don’t own a Mac, but I’ve resorted to borrowing others people's computers in order to solve what should be minuscule problems.  Then again, these were also problems back in 2012, so I guess my next tiffs update should be about the cancellation of Desperate Housewives, CSI: Miami, and Extreme Makeover: Home Edition!