Founder of excel collaboration and versioning startup [1] here so I am a believer. There are only about 30 million programmers. There are over 1 billion Excel

Founder of excel collaboration and versioning startup [1] here so I am a believer. There are only about 30 million programmers. There are over 1 billion Excel users. Excel is Turing complete. Excel is by far the most used programming language on the planet. It is easily 20 times more popular than the next contender. The value of Excel is that it is presenting the data, with a set of formulae that let you keep derived data up-to-date. This inferred data provides sums and computations, sometimes simple, but sometimes exquisitely complex. And through this whole range of complexity, with a billion users, virtually nobody treats Excel seriously like a programming language. We have a programming language which is essentially acting as a declarative database, and yet we don't do unit tests, we don't keep track of changes, we collaborate with Excel by sending it to our colleagues in the mail and god-forbid we should doing any serious linting of what is in the thing. Anyone who has used Excel in anger realizes why it is so brilliant. Show me another declarative constraint based, data driven inference language that I can teach to my grandmother. The problem isn't Excel. The problem is that we are treating Excel like its a word processor, and not what it is: a programming language. [1] https://versionxl.com/ https://versionxl.com/