I agree with you that it is a difficult problem to tackle and I've been thinking partly on what you say. About your first point there are two important things,

I agree with you that it is a difficult problem to tackle and I've been thinking partly on what you say. About your first point there are two important things, first that we are going to start with simple spreadsheets and then evolve to more complex ones. And second that we are going to have some user interaction, because there is a lot of information that is in the user's head that we can't infer only from the data. About the second point, the first "simple" spreadsheets are going to be (probably) without macros, etc. (anyway at the start we can do ThingsThatDontScale(TM)). I think that making a transpiler from excel functions to a programming language shouldn't be that difficult, but the macros are a totally different beast. Thanks for your reply!