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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 knowledg
by 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 agoI 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]