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kkfxyesterday at 3:38 PM3 repliesview on HN

A small note: in 2026, classic office suites shouldn't even exist in my opinion, so if the EU were to create a glorified R/Quarto, essentially a LaTeX wrapper with some basic calculation capabilities added, it would be infinitely better than any office suite.

My personal setup is Emacs/org-mode, using babel for the rest; I use Python with Polars, Plotly, and very occasionally SymPy just to avoid using Maxima if I'm already in Python. I see no reason at all to use LibreOffice, MS Office, or anything similar. This is what's actually needed. Billions should be invested in IT training, not in copies of software from another era designed to let untrained secretarial staff use a desktop.


Replies

harvey9yesterday at 4:03 PM

You use emacs so why should anyone else need MS Word? A large number of people use word processor software because it has advantages over typewriters or handwriting for their purposes rather than because they lack training in something more esoteric.

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bee_rideryesterday at 3:50 PM

It’s like you aren’t even interested in reinforcing Microsoft’s moat at all!

plagiaristyesterday at 4:05 PM

Sometimes I really like a spreadsheet. I found out at work that spreadsheets all have map / reduce now. That's fun. If there were a spreadsheet interface that was secretly R under the hood and tricked me into understanding R that would be neat.

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