I've seen Mito around HN and reddit before and I think it's an absolutely brilliant, but its applications may be more limited than the vast use cases covered by Excel. Maybe that's fine, as your goal may *be to carve out a niche rather than compete with Excel more broadly.

The reason I say that is I think the major pain point in its hypothetical widespread adoption would be getting users accustomed to the ergonomics of accessing attributes in a programming language when they only understand noob-friendly Excel formulas, which is more functional in nature.

Looking at the demo, I think some pseudo-code such as the following could be easier for e.g. an office worker than pure python:

    ADDCOLUMN(Sheet='Train Stations', Name='Accepts Bags') # defaults to appending at the end

    SETFORMULA(Column='Train Stations'!'Accepts Bags', As=IF('Train Stations'!'Checked Baggage' = "Y", 1, 0))

    PIVOT(From='Train Stations', To='Pivot', Keys=('State'), Values=('Accepts Bags'), Formula=SUM)

    SORT(Target='Pivot', By='Accepts Bags', Direction='Asc', NA='Hide') # defaults to ascending, NA first

Clearly, it's not like I've thought this through carefully and am not claiming this particular example is really ergonomic, but hopefully this illustrates the point I'm trying to make.

It would not need to look like Excel, but I think the jump from spreadsheet -> Python may be a step too far for the average user than, say, spreadsheet -> some functional approach.