He jokes and people cringe, but Excel is a huge win in some sorts of.. I'm not sure what to call it. I hesitate to call it programming because programming to me

He jokes and people cringe, but Excel is a huge win in some sorts of.. I'm not sure what to call it. I hesitate to call it programming because programming to me means all the text-file stuff from BASIC to C to Python to Haskell. It's a language that lacks the headaches of state and sports a wonderfully helpful editing and debugging/execution environment. Trying to get your calculations right while seeing tons of the intermediate results is often a lot easier, also, you don't have to worry about calculation order or dependencies.. It's automatically handled, as are incremental update calculations. I often wonder how we could get a similar benefits in non-spreadsheets. That said, it's a crumby language. You basically have to memorize the whole language to do well with it. Tons of stuff could be be dramatically better.. in fact, in some cases they were, e.g. functions defined in spreadsheet cells, but MS killed the competitors.