On 08/05/2016 01:28 AM, Josh wrote:
> Seeing other people's input on this topic, I suppose that there are
> already lots of other good ways to achieve the same thing. Shell
> aliases, shell scripts, scripts in other languages, editor hacks, etc.
> are all far more flexible, allowing multiple commands, parsing and
> processing of the output, interactivity, and so on. Sure, they do tie
> you to a particular tool set, limiting portability, but that's true no
> matter what: any system capable of describing non-trivial reports is
> going to be so complex as to essentially be a complete programming
> language, so we might as well just each pick an existing language we like.
I think the point is to have reports that users can download / share /
immediately exploit for their own personal use, such that they do not
have to come up with much integration or trust before they can use them.
We make a mistake when we tie functionality to specific text editors or
other platforms that users do not have or feel queasy about trying. I
know we've been burned by, e.g., the crappy reporting functionality in
GnuCash, but if we had a feature whereby people could define reports
that look nice to the eye and can be launched in a visual / printable
form (HTML?), and if those reports could be created by anyone who has
Web / GUI programming experience (but no Emacs experience), suddenly
you'd see a ton more reports flourish and be available for Ledger and
other command-line accounting tools.
Of course, the trick is to get the abstraction level right — as a person
who is using the program to query the data, I want the report and its
formatting to be mostly independent from the parameters I'm using to
gather the data.
THE most critical improvement that the command-line accounting
community can make, is getting reporting right. I was trying really
hard to get Ledger to give me the data via bindings so I could build an
unambiguous and error-free reporting system (both charts and textual
reports), but the crasher bugs in Ledger remain unfixed, and therefore I
cannot continue.
--
Rudd-O
http://rudd-o.com/
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