It's interesting to see this discussion of the future of Excel and complaints about its language. The fact of the matter is that the language is an evolved art

It's interesting to see this discussion of the future of Excel and complaints about its language. The fact of the matter is that the language is an evolved artifact with an incredible history. Spreadsheets started with VisiCalc. Then came Lotus 1-2-3, and Quattro. Finally, we have Excel and Numbers. The language that Excel uses is odd because it was forged in the fire of competition between vendors. Each of them had to support their predecessors' idiosyncrasies to get adopters. No one was able to make a clean cut at spreadsheet languages and make it stick. I know there have been some attempts. Back in the days of the spreadsheet Cambrian explosion there were even some oddities like 3D and nD spreadsheets. None of them could ditch "the language" that we are left with today. It's a shame. I think a good "ground up" redesign of the spreadsheet would be incredibly useful if it was done and people bothered to use it. The thing that makes it hard to revisit the spreadsheet is that it is "the programming model" for non-programmers. Non-programmers just want to get their work done and they bias toward familiarity.