I use Excel a fair bit at work, mostly for looking at data, but also to fairly easily generate SQL statements based on such data, often after some formulas have

I use Excel a fair bit at work, mostly for looking at data, but also to fairly easily generate SQL statements based on such data, often after some formulas have been applied. Though I think what I'd really want is some tool which has the same grid-like visualization, filtering and direct entering, but was code-based under the hood and without magic conversions. So, take Excel, and when you enter a formula in a cell, it actually writes a line of code for you, which you can inspect and edit. Including adding your own functions and such. When importing delimited text data, you'd have to specify what the data is in each column. It should still save the original text data so you can change your mind, but yeah, no automagic stuff.