The biggest problem with spreadsheet-oriented programming is that we haven't yet found the way to abstract table sections into reusable 'functions', which currently leads to tons of copy/paste.

There was a proposal to add user-defined table-based functions to Excel, by a group of authors including none other than Simon Peyton Jones, a major contributor to Haskell and GHC. Here's that paper: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/Papers...

Curiously, the paper is titled 'Improving the world's most popular functional language: user-defined functions in Excel'.

(And by the way, you can already name and refer to any range of cells in Excel, not just a row or a column. There's also a GUI dialog that lets you manage the names, e.g. rename, delete etc.)