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There's a 'joke' that goes around occasionally that has some truth to it: "Excel is the world's most popular programming language." Occasionally it's 'Excel mac
by onion2k 3mo ago
There's a 'joke' that goes around occasionally that has some truth to it: "Excel is the world's most popular programming language." Occasionally it's 'Excel macros' or 'VBA' instead of just Excel.[1]
The core truth of it is that a massive amount, possibly most, of the world's software is not a carefully hand-crafted application in that lives in Github written by expert software developers. It's a heap of Excel functions in an XSLX file, with no tests, no source control, no PRs, and no real planning behind it. And it works for that one specific task that the person who built it needed at the time.
AI vibe-coding is probably filling in the middle-ground between that stuff and 'real' code - it does more than just building somehting to complete today's task, and it is accretive in the sense that someone can build on top of it, but it doesn't really look that way to someone used to working on 'proper' software.
[1] Further reading if you're interested - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27048672 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27048672
- wseqyrku 3mo ago> AI vibe-coding is probably filling in the middle-ground [..] and it is accretive in the sense that someone can build on top of it To me 'accretive work' means something you do at a lower level than your task at hand which by itself doesn't count progress, but rather lay the groundwork for it so it's compounding from there on. AI has nothing to do with this.
- KolibriFly 3mo agoI think the argument is that AI changes the cost of creating that groundwork, not the definition of it
- wseqyrku 3mo agoI mean a groundwork you can rely on for the rest of your code.
- pavel_lishin 3mo agoI cannot overstate just how much I love working on stuff in Excel and Google Sheets. It's the most popular programming language because it's incredibly intuitive to people at all levels of programming experience (especially the "none" level), it offers instant feedback, and in many cases, the results are trivially verifiable. It does have its flaws, that you've pointed out - there's no good way to write tests, I'm not aware of any good way to have any sort of source control, and modularity is basically non-existent. But, damn - if I have a bunch of data I need to go through and/or present, Sheets is usually my go-to. I genuinely love it when my spouse asks me to troubleshoot some Sheets stuff for her.
- durovp 3mo agoYeah Google sheets is my go-to assistant these days Can't believe I used to ignore it before. Have even gotten better with add-on like AppScript and the rest. Even got a new tool called RowSink that helps me dump data easily into my sheets. So I'm kinda a maxed out Google sheets overlord right now.
- DonHopkins 3mo agoI'll take that one step further and claim that Excel is the world's most popular VISUAL programming language. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26668885 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26668885 >Spreadsheet certainly are visual programming languages: by any measure, by far one of the most common most widely used types of visual programming languages in the world.