Earlier this week, somebody who shall remain anonymous, was wondering out loud on the Perlmonks Chatterbox why he can't put an image in a CSV file.
I was simply baffled.
How can anybody claim to be a (junior) programmer, and so totally lack any insight in why this is not possible, or not even imaginable?
I asked him if he even knew what a CSV file was. Yes, it's a text file containing the text to put in fields in a table. Just the text.
It now makes me wonder if he knew what an image was, then.
It's things like that that really make me wonder if there can be any hope at all that anybody like that, may ever pick up enough technical insight and skills, to have any future as a programmer, at all.
Today, one of the developers pointed at my screen and asked "What's that?". "It's FireFox." "What's Firefox?"
I once worked with someone (for one day, they didn't return the next) that asked "What time is it?" -- I pointed at the clock on the wall -- "Oh, I don't read analog."
Re:Maybe they'll make it in management
vek on 2008-06-14T18:54:24
Something similar, although mine was Ubuntu. "What's Ubuntu?". I've also had a "what's slashdot?". And queue eye roll time.Re:Maybe they'll make it in management
ajt on 2008-06-15T12:31:17
Though most people here know what Firefox is or what Ubuntu is, you would be amazed at how few people actually know anything at all. The average person thinks Microsoft Windows = Office, Internet Explorer = Internet, Outlook/Hotmail = email. People mix Windows and MS Office up because they are always together, the internet is IE and email is either Outlook or Hotmail - they don't know there are alternatives or which piece is which.
Microsoft seem to be doing very well on this general level of ignorance. Even many people allegedly IT literate know surprisingly little. It's quite a trick making billions out of general ignorance...
Re:Encoding?
bart on 2008-06-14T21:01:59
Gee, maybe the idea isn't as absurd as I thought? You could indeed use a special encoding to put binary data into a field instead of text. You will have to find a way to mark it as binary data, because you cannot rely on the text contents alone to recognize it as such. For example, you could always quote plain text, and use an unquoted data URI for binary contents.The spreadsheet program that is the target to read the file should be aware of the encoding, so it cannot be thought of as still being CSV, even though it is based on CSV.
The reason why this person wanted to generate his output as CSV files is of course a healthy form of laziness: do not do more than absolutely necessary. Having to apply such an encoding on binary data definitely does break down this simplicity.
