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Excel is a triumph of software. Never before has there been a REPL so powerful, a programming language so widely used, an environment so simple even mere mortal

Excel is a triumph of software. Never before has there been a REPL so powerful, a programming language so widely used, an environment so simple even mere mortals can produce magic - without it what would we have? The power of software would remain closed behind the Ivory gates of the self-titled engineers with development cycles, sprints and countless hours to make a single formulae change. Fear the excel less world, for without it society is a shadow of its potential!

smabie 6y ago
I don't actually like Excel, and think it could be significantly better, but in general, I agree with you. Excel has allowed users with domain specific knowledge to create real honest to god software cheaply and quickly. The biggest triumph of Excel is that you can incrementally learn new things, slowly turning a basic worksheet into a Turing complete masterpiece. In contrast, I believe that programming languages have a much higher barrier to entry.
- wintorez 6y ago
  I would like to argue that Excel (i.e. spreadsheets) are a form of programming language; albeit in tabular format. Each cell is a variable, some cells are constants, some cells are computed, cells can be conditional, etc. A programming language must not necessary come in form of written text. We can say that concept of spreadsheet is the programming language, and Excel, Google Sheets, etc. are just implementation of the same concept. The success of spreadsheet is in the fact that its visual and intuitive, similar to what made Visual Basic and Delphi very successful.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
tuatoru 6y ago
> without it what would we have? In an ideal world, we would have pgsql (the PostgreSQL front-end) and AWK, and people who realize that thinking about the model before you start playing with layouts and copy-pasting formulas is a good idea. Edit: Excel is a Dunning-Kruger syndrome enabler. People think they can do data analysis because they can type "=sum(B1:B4)" into a spreadsheet.
- qayxc 6y ago
  We seem to have wildly different definitions of the term "ideal"...
- hermitcrab 6y ago
  I last used AWK about 30 years ago. It seemed clunky then. Does it still output "Bailing out at line 1" regardless of the error?
- 7952 6y ago
  Just coincidentally I spent most of the last week converting a spreadsheet to Postgres. It is interesting how similar some of the formula functions are to SQL functions. All the functions are standalone and there are no methods on top of objects/types.

smabie 6y ago

I don't actually like Excel, and think it could be significantly better, but in general, I agree with you. Excel has allowed users with domain specific knowledge to create real honest to god software cheaply and quickly. The biggest triumph of Excel is that you can incrementally learn new things, slowly turning a basic worksheet into a Turing complete masterpiece. In contrast, I believe that programming languages have a much higher barrier to entry.

wintorez 6y ago
I would like to argue that Excel (i.e. spreadsheets) are a form of programming language; albeit in tabular format. Each cell is a variable, some cells are constants, some cells are computed, cells can be conditional, etc. A programming language must not necessary come in form of written text. We can say that concept of spreadsheet is the programming language, and Excel, Google Sheets, etc. are just implementation of the same concept. The success of spreadsheet is in the fact that its visual and intuitive, similar to what made Visual Basic and Delphi very successful.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

tuatoru 6y ago

> without it what would we have? In an ideal world, we would have pgsql (the PostgreSQL front-end) and AWK, and people who realize that thinking about the model before you start playing with layouts and copy-pasting formulas is a good idea. Edit: Excel is a Dunning-Kruger syndrome enabler. People think they can do data analysis because they can type "=sum(B1:B4)" into a spreadsheet.

qayxc 6y ago
We seem to have wildly different definitions of the term "ideal"...
hermitcrab 6y ago
I last used AWK about 30 years ago. It seemed clunky then. Does it still output "Bailing out at line 1" regardless of the error?
7952 6y ago
Just coincidentally I spent most of the last week converting a spreadsheet to Postgres. It is interesting how similar some of the formula functions are to SQL functions. All the functions are standalone and there are no methods on top of objects/types.