An acquaintance I used to live near has a custom pool in her yard that she designed and specified via Excel! She's a programmer, so she could have used a wide r

An acquaintance I used to live near has a custom pool in her yard that she designed and specified via Excel! She's a programmer, so she could have used a wide range of tools but Excel was what she reached for and it evidently did the trick nicely. The thing that stands out to me in these stories is that spreadsheet programs are a (1) the most common site of programmability that features in anyone's lives, even non-programmer; and (2) for many tasks, spreadsheets sit at some kind of local optimum in a tradeoff between simplicity and power. (There's surely something for engineers and designers to learn from the second point.) It seems like a connection worth celebrating, between people like us and the mostly non-programming public— a little piece of overlap between two worlds.