visicalc is not the benchmark you think it is. it's decades old. this day and age, dependency graphs for any real world use case will definitely need a dependency graph. it helps no one to suggest otherwise, and actually makes light of a specific engineering task that will for a fact be required of anyone looking to build a spreadsheet engine into a product

I'm not suggesting otherwise. I'm saying that your "toy example" comment is very dismissive of something that was an extraordinary accomplishment of its day. They invented spreadsheets without it. Dependency graphs are excellent and widely useful things we should all be happy to adapt and reach for, far beyond spreadsheets. We should be grateful that they're available to all of us to build into software products so readily. I've used them repeatedly and I'm sure I will many times in the future.

What I'm trying to communicate is this: this product _invented_ spreadsheets, but you dismiss the implementation with a sneer.