there was an assignment to print 10000 random number. a guy used excel, put a fo... | Hacker News

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penetrator on May 16, 2012 | parent | context | favorite | on: The First Time I Used Programming At Work

there was an assignment to print 10000 random number.

a guy used excel, put a formula into cell A1, and drag it to A10000. file-print ... presto ... wait for 200 pages or so

i wrote a one liner matlab and printed the result in about 20 pages

i just happened to know little bit of matlab -- and that's all needed to 'beat' the competition by 1000%

Dylan16807 on May 17, 2012 | [–]

The way I see it you came out about the same, both getting things done in under five minutes. Excel guy could have dragged from A1 to J1000 if he cared about page count.

K2h on May 16, 2012 | [–]

I wonder if this would have worked for your assignment.

http://www.random.org/integers/

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