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The problem is that the surrounding tooling is underdeveloped. Spreadsheets give the most widely accessible programming language available today, with a featur
by dzdt 11y ago
The problem is that the surrounding tooling is underdeveloped. Spreadsheets give the most widely accessible programming language available today, with a feature set that makes it an order of magnitude faster for making solutions to certain problems than any other language. Terrific!
But do you have source control? Diff? Three-way-diff? Unit tests? Code review? Any process at all?
Any programming language lets you hack up a solution for one-off problems; for most languages there are tools and an ecosystem to help "production" code meet higher standards. The problem isn't that Excel is commonly used, it is that there is no ecosystem to support its "production" use.
- brudgers 11y agoIn fairness, the ecosystem around Excel is more than 30 years old and the community's expectations reflect that. There's nothing stopping someone from writing a test harness for Excel files...it's all automatable. There's nothing preventing a person from storing Excel files in version control or running a diff on the underlying XML. The reason it isn't done is because by the time end users care about those things enough to get around to implementing them, they're probably ready for a process that already addresses those problems with baked in functionality...e.g. an RDBMS and application layer. When there's a business case for something better than Excel there are products and services and consultants that serve that business case.