[HN Gopher] Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL (2019)
___________________________________________________________________
Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL (2019)
Author : tosh
Score : 104 points
Date : 2021-03-21 16:38 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bofh.org.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (bofh.org.uk)
| d_burfoot wrote:
| I think PostgreSQL is great, but I also think SQLite would be
| much better for this use case.
| nimchimpsky wrote:
| why ?
| oblio wrote:
| What would be even cooler would be a minimally updated FoxPro,
| just to make it run on modern OSes and such.
| wolfgang42 wrote:
| (2019); discussed at the time:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19252952 (191 comments)
| boomer918 wrote:
| Why would ever you use anything else.
| [deleted]
| FpUser wrote:
| Look ma, no cloud ;)
| submeta wrote:
| I've been using MS Access some twenty years ago to do all sorts
| of magic for small businesses. That was from the 90s to the early
| 2000s. - Later I'd use Python to do magic for companies who
| didn't know anything better than MS Excel to handle large sets of
| data, and when they were lost in chaos, I'd start to streamline,
| process, tidy their data and help them make sense.
|
| Just two examples that showed me: Use whatever helps you to get
| the job done, automate and streamline processes, select tools
| that might give you a competitive advantage.
|
| Edit: I love Emacs, for everything text and code and some more,
| but there are way better tools for the task the author describes.
| bitwize wrote:
| Emacs (esp. with org-mode) sits close to the barycenter of the
| space of problems like this, where the vector sum of "effort to
| use the solution to solve the problem" and "engineering effort
| needed to build the solution" is quite low. Building a React
| web app, or a Visual Basic bespoke app, might yield a nicer to
| use program, but would require more effort than throwing
| something together with Emacs Lisp, SQLite, and org-mode.
|
| It's one reason why I won't give Emacs up, again despite half
| of Hackernews being convinced the VSCode will solve world
| hunger.
| submeta wrote:
| I love Emacs and Orgmode, especially in combination with
| Sqlite. And I am convinced that VS Code - despite doing so
| many things right - does not have the versatility and the
| capability of Emacs, no matter how many packages are written
| for it because it is not intended to be configured by it's
| end users in a way where they read the code of the packages,
| learn from them, change them according to their needs and
| automate all kinds of processes / workflows with it. Emacs is
| an application framework for the user with a hacker mindset.
| And Emacs Lisp is the underlying scripting languages that
| invites you to play around with your tool.
|
| Having said that: Yes, you can run your business with Emacs
| alone. But I am not convinced it is the right tool for the
| job.
| jsilence wrote:
| Only vaguely related: what would be the Access equivalent of
| today? Somethings with low learning curve and forms.
|
| Any suggestions?
| jedimastert wrote:
| Access still exists, although I haven't used it in a long
| time
|
| Alternatively, you can access Google Sheets with SQL queries,
| although I guess it probably wouldn't be great, but Google
| Forms + Sheets?
| ako wrote:
| One of the low- or no-code tools.
| tosh wrote:
| glide
|
| https://www.glideapps.com
| submeta wrote:
| Simple CRUD apps with Python + Flask or Django I'd say.
| couchpotatonews wrote:
| Even easier would be to use a CMS, I prefer Processwire but
| many others also have great form builders and generic
| list/calendar/etc views.
| jsilence wrote:
| Thank you for all the suggestions! Will check them out!
| tyingq wrote:
| Commercial Web-Based Databases: http://quickbase.com
| https://www.zoho.com/creator/ https://www.knack.com/
| https://bubble.io/ https://airtable.com/
| https://www.claris.com/filemaker/ https://www.appsheet.com/
| https://ninox.com/en https://www.honeycode.aws/
| https://www.ragic.com/ https://www.fusioo.com/
|
| Surprisingly, there's not much in the way of open source with
| the same level of functionality as above. Here's a few:
|
| https://cortezaproject.org/ https://www.openxava.org/
| https://www.joget.org/ https://www.nubuilder.com/
| https://www.openoffice.org/product/base.html
| https://baserow.io/
| drran wrote:
| GnuCobol? Text mode only.
| SEXY_DEVE_GOWDA wrote:
| Oracle Apex is probably the best
| dyeje wrote:
| Airtable
| Topgamer7 wrote:
| In his follow up post he talks about union combining identical
| results. If the author ever reads this, you can prevent that by
| using `union all` instead of just `union`. That won't remove
| duplicates.
| radiowave wrote:
| Indeed, though his work-around of adding a path column is
| something is worth having anyway, because it makes it much
| easier to see where the generated output has come from.
| slk500 wrote:
| Soon Emacs will replace bread oven.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| This is super cool, but I'd worry _a lot_ about passing on the
| domain knowledge to somebody else without a dead-simple TUI /GUI.
| Eventually somebody else will need to run things.
| asguy wrote:
| This reminds me of supermarket clerks running IBM 3270 apps one
| handed. As long as the UI is straight forward, it doesn't need
| to be pretty or slick. It just needs to be second nature.
| dm319 wrote:
| Training I guess?
| spicybright wrote:
| I'd also worry about bugs accidentally inserting bogus data
| into it.
|
| The author says he doesn't like spreadsheets because of all the
| copy and pasting, but I think that's a feature.
|
| You go over every calculation to make sure it's right, and once
| you have a template sheets to copy and paste for a monthly
| report or something, you're able to do a lot less of that.
|
| It can be hard to view a raw database to track issues down
| depending on how it's structured. Usually you need more than
| viewing tables as spread sheets at least.
| codemonkey-zeta wrote:
| Will this be software the author will ever have to pass on? I'd
| guess probably not, considering it's software for his small
| bakery. It's software directly tied to his identity - he's the
| sole consumers. That's exactly the kind of software emacs is
| great for, and precisely the kind of software "hacker" types
| use.
|
| He's not going to sell this as a "bakery management system" and
| become a software company, he's just going to bake bread. If he
| needs to share the _information_, then he can just print
| reports, that's ostensibly what the system is _for_.
| eb0la wrote:
| Well, looks like Emacs is really an operating system disguised as
| a text editor.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-03-21 23:00 UTC)