This is one of the beauties of Matlab and similar languages. They look and act like excel but more explicit and powerful. (and harder to use) Matlab documentait

This is one of the beauties of Matlab and similar languages. They look and act like excel but more explicit and powerful. (and harder to use) Matlab documentaiton is very similar to excel documentation and the ability to run m-files with the touch of a button gives a lot of 'reactivity' that other languages lack. Also a live, easily accessible and manipulable variable editor makes it much easier to work with data. I would really like a program that wrapped something like Matlab around excel. Basically something that let you work in excel then let you hit a button to 'vomit' the variable space into Matlab code. I often find it much easier to manipulate data in Excel and often find myself working in Excel until it becomes too burdensome then swapping over and converting into Matlab or Python. I think seeing a language 'live coded' and being able to alter the live code would allow people to bridge the gap more easily. It would also fix the debugging issues as each spreadsheet would also contain a executable code that could be implanted into other spreadsheets easily, (it would also contain a number of assumptions made explicit like what variables it takes in and what it kicks out.) Of course how strings etc are handled is a messy question. A similar tool exists for the open source scientific image altering toolbox-ImageJ that allows it to 'record' your actions and easily loop/automate your code by turning your calls into code as you perform them. I've found non-programmers can easily learn how to write 'code-like' actions into this macro language.