You can say what you want about Excel, but it succeeded at something where countless other software failed: Providing a smooth transition between manual data en

You can say what you want about Excel, but it succeeded at something where countless other software failed: Providing a smooth transition between manual data entry and programming and putting it in an interface that's easy to understand while powerful enough to accomplish many interesting tasks. On a side note, one could say that Tensorflow is a (very) distinct Excel relative, as it also builds up a declarative description of your computation in form of a graph and then figures out how to compute that graph in an efficient manner. Excel is (in my understanding) doing something very similar by analyzing the dataflow between individual cells to compute or update values. So maybe if we add support for backpropagation into Excel it could make a fantastic deep learning tool :D