On Mon, Sep 8, 2014 at 3:22 AM, Gour <[email protected]> wrote: > On Sun, 7 Sep 2014 11:12:26 -0400 > Martin Blais <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hello Martin, > > > Again, what makes you think that the other softwares are "running > > behind"? In some of the ways that it differs, I view some of the new > > features I implement in Beancount as new and pushing the envelope > > forward. > > don't get me wrong...but I use Gnucash for several years and before that > I spent some time whether I should start taking care about my finances > and do bookkeeping. Even then, I was aware of the existance of both > ledger and hledger - it looks I had to go throuugh experience with GC > before considering cli - but never heard about Beancount until 10 days > ago or so. > > Hledger clearly says it does not support all the ledger's features, > although it adds some of its own stuff like web ui, some reports etc., > so, as John confirmed, my impression was that for the 'core' financial > stuff, ledger is the leader.
On this list and in the documents I've shared with you I've argued and shown specific examples how the lack of inventory booking in Ledger's model offers little support for entering a correct replication of investment trades and calculate capital gains incorrectly. It makes it very difficult if not impossible to enter correct data about past trades--errors in data entry are very common in my experience (that is, the experience of creating a replication of 8 years worth of trades with a system that _does_ detect such errors, errors which would otherwise have gone undetected by the Ledger model). The "conversions" problem is also not solved--it is possible with Ledger to produce a trial balance with a residual value, which is impossible in Beancount--this provides an additional assurance of correctness. For these reasons, in terms of "core financial" stuff, the current model Ledger implements falls short, and the model Beancount offers is better suited for replicating account history, especially when it comes to maintaining cost basis of investments. > > I see 2.0beta: > > https://pypi.python.org/pypi/beancount > > > > I've just updated and called it 2.0beta2 > > (I'm not very good about updating indexes all around the web.) > > I was Googling for Beancount and the link for 0.9 was higher. :-) > > Moreover, I run Debian Sid and was able to install (h)ledger with > simple: apt-get install, while I do not see packages for Beancount? > That's just because nobody packaged it for Debian. Clone the repo, "python3 setup.py install". Standard procedure. I won't package for all distros myself, I have other things to do. > > > Aren't they nicely readable and beautifully formatted and available > > on all your devices and in many formats? Isn't this the goal of > > documentation? Why don't you like them? > > I like that 'reading' is separate from 'editing'. There was a user in > #ledger yesterday who got the feeling that he needs to have Google > account to be able to read it and he wrote: "I give it up." > Well he did not try very hard. I find it odd that some in the open source community balk at the use of my documentation tools. The point of documentation is that you're able to read it. If you can read it and contribute to it, the goal has been achieved. How conservative. > > Why don't you simply use something like https://readthedocs.org/ which > seems to be popular for Python stuff? > Because I think Google Docs is better. There is simply no parallel in how it allows you to make immediate corrections without having to patch source code and rebuild. I can even make changes on my phone while I'm on the go! Unless someone builds and maintains a similar "libre" service, there is simply no comparison when it comes to allowing you to contribute changes and fixes and comments. In the few months I've shared my Beancount documents, I've already received far more contributions and corrections than in 10 entire years of traditional rst-based documentation for all my other projects combined. Most often in the OSS community, people don't contribute to docs. So far the experiment is paying off handsomely and I have felt little to desire to retreat to my old tools. If anything, it has encouraged me to write more. I love Google Docs. > I just click on the "reject" button to remove those accidental > > suggestions when that happens. Also, I might accept the suggestion but > > reject the specific change and reword things manually to make it > > better; that would also show up as a rejected suggestion. Nothing > > personal. > > > Nothing personal, don't worry, but it was a bit strange. For me, it's > more natural to use my preferred editor, fix things and then 'pull > request', send a patch etc. > Things change; adapt yourself. People are reluctant to change. Realize this. The world used to be desktops, then it was mostly all laptops, and by now it's mostly devices. You can highlight text, right-click and add a comment right there in your browser, and you automatically get an email notification later on. How unnatural can this possibly be? If what you have is an ideological problem with the software and the fact it's hosted at Google, I have no time for this. I'm interested in finding solutions to build accounting software via text files, I'm not on a mission to expand the GNU universe. > Furthermore, beyond their capabilities, languages nurture particular > > cultures. In many ways, these cultures subsume the particular > > technical advantages of computer languages. As examples relevant to > > the case in point, despite its inherent looseness in typing and > > glaring performance disadvantages, Python has succeeded in creating a > > uniquely vibrant culture of "making things simple and explicit," with > > great documentation and adherence to well-defined contracts (via > > conventions). > > Considering that Hledger is slower than Ledger, I wonder how does > Benacount perform in comparison? > I don't know about a specific comparison, but with the most hardcore checks I process my 8 years of data in about under 2 seconds on a 2008 macbook laptop running Linux. There are two specific spots for performance optimization, I think with a few simple optimizatins I will cut this down by half. In any case, it's well within reasonable bounds for command-line interaction in my view. Note that the comparison is a bit unfair as well: Beancount applies a lot of verification tests that Ledger and HLedger do not have. -- --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ledger" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
