I've done some pretty mindbending things with VBA on Excel. They work but they are not pretty and not easy to maintain. VBA is technically a "complete" languag

I've done some pretty mindbending things with VBA on Excel. They work but they are not pretty and not easy to maintain. VBA is technically a "complete" language (I want to say Turing-complete but that is not a meaningful trait), so it is possible to do a lot with it, but one ends up having to re-implement (sometimes badly) stuff found in other languages in order to write the main parts of the code. Part of what makes VBA deceptively easy is the control over the interactive elements of Excel (a lot of stuff is done with the Range object), but unfortunately that also introduces state that you can't always control, which entails write extra checks to make sure the state is correct before proceeding. This is especially true if your users are on different versions of Excel (I once wrote something in 2010 that doesn't work in 2016). There are now other options like QueryStorm [1], which lets you write C# in Excel and connect to SQL databases. There are also a bunch of Python-Excel solutions that are based on manipulating COM objects, but I've learned that when dealing with a Microsoft stack, there are advantages to using Microsoft-native languages like C#. Coming back to the article, it mentions adding arrays, vectors, and records to Excel itself; this will make Excel much more powerful because it has traditionally been a cell-based computation system, which has disadvantages that higher-level abstractions overcome (like vectors and tables). It also mentions writing Excel functions in a first class manner instead of relying on a separate procedural language like VBA. Operations on arbitrary sized arrays will also help it transcend Excel's issue of operating on fixed size arrays -- this will clean up a lot of very messy formulas. These developments will be interesting to watch, because it brings Excel much closer to a true functional computing system, and gets closer to Quantrix [2] territory. [1] https://www.querystorm.com/ https://www.querystorm.com/ [2] Quantrix is a multidimensional spreadsheet, and a commercial successor to Lotus Improv.