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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • First, thank you for the thoughtful and detailed reply. I find it helpful.

    Plain text accounting (and all the variants) sounds great, right until you need to use it to generate invoices, or depreciate assets, or do a monthly Business Activity Statement, or convert a currency, track repayments, etc.

    All of those things require that you write software to achieve that, which means that now instead of solving problems and writing software for my clients, I’m burning hours writing software so I can run my business

    Oddly enough, I feel the opposite: I’m so glad that I have the freedom to use other tools to do what I need and that I can simply write some custom software to achieve that. I always felt locked in by QuickBooks and now I can do anything from messing around in a spreadsheet to writing what I need with jq. Plain text as an interface means that the sky is the limit for flexibility.

    It has also made my company’s financial information more accesible to me. Previously, I’d given it over to bookkeepers and accountants and only seen out of date financial statements when it was time to file taxes. Now I know what’s going on whenever I want.

    It has also turned bookkeeping into a programming exercise, which made me more interested, not less. I don’t have clients waiting impatiently for me to produce features for them, so I can enjoy this wro instead of having it feel like a distraction.

    I’ve been writing software for over 40 years and until last week I’d never heard of it. That’s not something you want in business software.

    I feel that!

    Because I’m still running a 25 year old accounting package that doesn’t run on current hardware, isn’t supported, doesn’t run under Linux and has all my data hostage.

    Our motivations definitely seem compatible, even if our constraints and preferences don’t.

    Thanks again. Good luck.






  • I speak a couple of languages in which there is no continuous present, but rather they use phrases such as “I sit and study Swedish” to mean “I’m studying Swedish (as in right now, that’s the task I’m doing)” or “I am in the process of reading a book”. They don’t change the form of the verb to highlight this continuous aspect, so perhaps they aren’t used to it.

    Add to that that the continuous aspect in English is surprisingly complicated and arbitrary. If you try to nail down rules for how and when to use it, you might struggle. 😉 Folks struggling to use it correctly might be overcorrecting or merely confused.

    There are, I’m sure, other reasons, but this is enough to account for some of what you’re seeing.









  • I don’t mind at all. Beyond my explanation, you might like to try to use an online regular expression checker to explore small changes to the regex to see how it matches what it matches.

    Headings always match #\s+, because that’s the character # followed by whitespace (\s) one or more times (+). Other text matches this, but so not all matches are headings, but all headings match. (You might have # blah in the middle of the text, which would match. If that’s a problem, then you can change the regex to ^#\s+, where ^ means “from the beginning of a line”.

    Tags always match #[^\s], which means the character # followed by one not whitespace character. Be careful: tags match this regex, but this regex doesn’t match the entire tag. It only says “there is a tag here”.

    Fortunately, that doesn’t hurt, because your Python code could match #[^\s] and then turn that # into \# and thereby successfully avoid escaping the #s at the beginning of headings. You could even use regex to do this by capturing the non-whitespace character at the beginning of the tag and “putting it back” using regex search and replace.

    Replace #([^s]) with \#\1.

    The parentheses capture the matching characters (the first character of the tag) and \1 echoes back the captured characters. It would replace #a with \#a and so on.

    I hope I explained this clearly enough. I see the other folks also tried, so I hope that together, you found an explanation that works well enough for you.

    Peace.



  • Excessive apologies can feel disingenuous and perfunctory. That makes it difficult for me to know when an apology is genuine. That erodes my trust.

    Excessive apologies can signal to me that the other person sees me as a threat, and I don’t want to feel like a threat, so I feel attacked.

    But I could also choose to interpret excessive apologies as a sign of past trauma, so I could choose to have compassion and patiently ask the other person to talk to me about what’s going on. I can share how I feel and hope that they feel ready to discuss what’s happening for them. Patience would be key.