My take is that programming languages have an inadequate ratio between abstract and concrete data flows. You are supposed to build code by stitching together c

My take is that programming languages have an inadequate ratio between abstract and concrete data flows. You are supposed to build code by stitching together commands for all the data handling functions required to handle each case in the data. Yet development environments make it really hard to actually _see_ what effect the functions are having on the data. You need to enter a special debug mode and place strategic breakpoints, logs and watched expressions, instead of making easy to compare the full program state before and after executing each function. In that respect, spreadsheets and reactive functional languages make it easier to prototype new software fast, since they have close together both functions and the data on which the functions operate; and in spreadsheets, you also get the intermediate steps for chains of functions.