This might give a little more detail: https://vanderworp.org/notes/geany-vs-notepad/

Or https://www.geany.org/manual/current/index.html#editing or https://www.geany.org/manual/current/index.html#editor-keybindings

Have you used both programs? Or are you just going on impressions from the blurb on geany's website and the name of Notepad++? I've used both for programming, and they behave similarly. Granted, I don't use all of the features in either one.

Heck, even the front page of https://notepad-plus-plus.org/ says,

What is a source code editor that supports several programming languages other than a programmer's editor?

Geany comes up in multiple lists of Notepad++ alternatives, for example, https://askubuntu.com/questions/313973/what-are-the-alternatives-to-notepad-on-ubuntu

You're right about the poles. That said, backing over one entails driving toward a networked automated license plate reader with the side of the car that has a license plate on it... And they can identify cars by features other than license plates (color, make, stickers, dents, etc.).

Furthermore, they are networked automated license plate readers. Using a vehicle to damage them is particularly ill conceived.

Do they edit the result or just ship it?

Geany is a nice text editor with similar functionality to Notepad++. https://www.geany.org/

Long-term changes in funding of higher education and more recent changes in funding of basic scientific research are more concerning to me on this front.

A field can change a lot in 35 years.

I can see someone saying something like that if they don't feel progress is being made. I met someone at a conference who said, "Everyone thinks their own research is bullshit." That rang true to me.

It can be quite dangerous, yes.

The biggest benefit of the new features is the ability to create named functions that can be reused. Which means I can write it once, debug it, put it in a commented text file in a GitHub gist, and then rely on it in the future. That's a lot better than copying some huge, unreadable formula across hundreds of cells.

This can improve the readability of existing spreadsheets. It can also be used judiciously to add nice features that still make sense in spreadsheets. I implemented a function for cubic spline interpolation of data, for example. Doing that directly with formulas would be a nightmare, but it's pretty clean with the named function.

Somewhere a little more sophisticated than that is getting into danger territory. It's tempting because the people I work with love and understand spreadsheets but are less comfortable working with traditional programming languages. I am comfortable doing "real programming" and prefer it due to a mixed background. My manager thinks spreadsheets are overused. But spreadsheets are what most of my coworkers know, so they're what we use in practice.

I weep for all the scientists wasting their lives working on quantum computing, which will never work. They'll wish they had listened to gweihir. Same goes for all the companies wasting money on this technological dead end. They need to get their heads out of the sand.

Last I looked, it didn't have support for LAMBDA. Here's a post indicating it wasn't a feature as of 15 days ago, but someone is working on it: https://ask.libreoffice.org/t/is-a-lambda-function-in-calc-possible/75866.

Do you realize who you're talking to? Slashdot's very own gweihir is the most knowledgeable person in the world on the viability of quantum computing. Indeed, everyone else is an idiot.

Someone has implemented

bool isEven(uint32_t n);

with this method. See https://andreasjhkarlsson.github.io/jekyll/update/2023/12/27/4-billion-if-statements.html

That's a fascinating take.

I've recently discovered lambda functions in Excel. Between dynamic arrays, LAMBDA(), LET(), and the advanced formula environment module of the Excel Labs add-on (import functions form a GitHub gist), it is possible to do some actual programming in Excel. https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.00115 discusses some of that.

I'm in electrical engineering and have started using Excel with these features more often because at least now I don't have to copy long, unreadable formulas into hundreds of cells, and my coworkers love spreadsheets. I also write programs in C++ and Octave to solve engineering problems, but that's a higher bar for other people to work with.