Ad-hoc SQL workday be nice too. PowerQuery is nice (great, even) but it doesn’t feel like it’s a part of Excel - and while it’s language is better than SQL, I really don’t want to have to learn a whole new syntax to express the same simple ideas.
It’s funny though because so many people who crank on excel don’t know what types are. And don’t know what variables are. And don’t have the layers of mental abstraction that programmers who want types have and need.
So the expected protections don’t really happen. So while it’s nice to not convert “01” to “1” automatically, lots of errors will probably be caused by people trying to add “01” and “02” and getting “0102” and being super confused.
I do think that bringing new syntax to the table is justifiable if it brings new concepts with it.
I agree, power query is essentially a separate product and doesn’t feel first class. I think that probably explains its relative obscurity, despite being highly powerful.
JavaScript is strongly-typed though, it just lacks a way to declare types. One can easily restrict types in script code (using `typeof` for primitives and `instanceof` for object prototypes).
People refer to it as "weakly-typed" because most (but not all) of the built-in types have implicit conversions to other types; and many of which are non-obvious: https://github.com/denysdovhan/wtfjs