If anything we need more Excels. Excel is coding for people who don't even know they're coding.

Karen from accounting made an entire app even though she's not a "software developer" by trade and people think that's a bad thing?

I also agree with your sentiment. Excel is coding for people who are not programmers.

But I think the author conflates 1) engineering practices

2) Programming

3) Expressing domain knowledge using tables, charts and numbers

Most excel users do 3) They are certainly not programmers, and the do not follow engineering practices we associated with programming: modularity, hiearchical or functional re-usability, testability, etc

Excel creators do not reproduce bug reports, do not measure their success by the number of bugs they fixed, they do not do SDLC...

These are not particularly fault of excel. But as soon as there is a recognition that 'oh that excel workbook needs to be managed by programmers' -- then after a few month programmers realize that Excel and VBA macros are subpar programming environment, and will just argue that the way that the author does -- that it does not make sense to maintain a complex, business critical code within Excel.

So they will re-write it in Python or something else.

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I think Ex cell's success in the business world is precisely because it allows non-programmers to bypass the whole SDLC and express their domain knowledge in a computational system.

As programmers, we want to replace Excel with something that

a) allows business users to do what they want to do, without SDLC

b) when their work reaches a certain level of complexity, we want the tool to allow us to gradually transition the work the domain users have done into an engineered piece of software with minimal effort, free of cost, easy to debug.

I do not think such as system exists yet, but that would be a killer app

Totally agree. Excel is incredibly powerful, and people like Karen are doing real development, whether they realize it or not. My point wasn’t that Excel (or visual tools) are bad, it’s that when systems grow in complexity, they eventually need the same discipline, clarity, and maintainability that code provides. And that’s where things can get messy if we’re not careful.

Yeah, isn't the main user of those tools non-developers? It's not that developers are getting lazy, it's that people who aren't developers also have technical needs (and some chops).

More excels and more improvements to debugging excel please (:

The real super power to excel is you can see the data as it flows through the cells. Whenever I see a visual programming tool that is just a way to write a regular script by linking up a DAG I can't help but feel like they missed the point. Motivated non-programmers have been using COUNTIF, VLOOKUP and such since forever. They're not incapable of writing a textual program 1 statement at a time, it's just that most programming environments don't facilitate it.