Starting back in 2011 I was working on a way to manage a variety of spreadsheets in a variety of layouts with a common schema. Over the last 13 years, I've been updating and maintaining this little project. It's not widely used, but it interests me.

Fundamentally, the use of …

Enterprise COBOL is both a liability and an asset. There's tangible value hidden in the code.

See https://github.com/slott56/looking-at-cobol

I've tweaked the presentation a little.

The essential ingredients in coping with COBOL are these:

• Use something like Stingray Reader to parse COBOL DDE's and process the data …

Apple's freebie tools -- Pages, Numbers, Keynote, Garage Band, etc. -- are wonderful things. I really like Numbers. I'm tolerant of Pages. I've used Pages to write books and publish them to the Apple Bookstore. (Shameless Plug: Pivot to Python.)

These tools have a significant problem. Protobuf.

I need to rewrite Stingray Reader. This project handles a certain amount of file processing using a schema to assure the Logical Layout is understood. It handles several common Physical Formats:

• CSV files where the format is extended by the various dialects options.
• COBOL files in ASCII or EBCDIC.

The …

I made some bad decisions when I wrote this a few years ago: https://github.com/slott56/Stingray-Reader. Really bad. And. Recently, I've burdened myself with conflicting goals. Ugh.

I need to upgrade to Python 3.8, and add type hints. This exposed somes badness.

See Stingray Reader Rewrite for …

See {filename}/blog/2020/01/2020_01_26-stingrayreader_upgrade.rst

This drifted into some serious rethinking of bad design decisions. (If someone else did this, I'd call it weak, and suggest improvements. It was me. It was bad. I'm a bad programmer and I feel bad about it.)

An an example, there's this …

some_data = {name: source[name] for name in the_names}
the_object = SomeClass(**some_data)

Or "When is it time to move?"

I've got https://sourceforge.net/projects/stingrayreader/ which has been on SourceForge since forever.

Really since about 2014. Not that long. But. Maybe long enough?

The velocity of change is relatively slow.

However.

(And this is a big however.) SourceForge seems kind of …

A common way to save persistent, important data is a spreadsheet. It provides a handy, potentially normalized store that's readily accessible with minimal tooling. It has a UI usable by people with a spectrum of skills.

Sadly.

There's a core conflict:

• The advantages of spreadsheets-as-database are numerous.
• The disadvantage is …

I remain captivated by the ideals of Literate Programming. My fork of PyLit (https://github.com/slott56/PyLit-3) coupled with Sphinx seems to handle LP programming in a very elegant way.

It works like this.

1. Write RST files describing the problem and the solution. This includes the actual implementation code …