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Comment by ivyirwin | Hacker News Reader

I get the spirit of the document, but disagree with the goal. I'm biased, I've kind of made my career writing web applications for people reliant on Excel. While I've come to respect it's power – I had a colleague in architecture school design buildings using excel and I've seen some ridiculous formulas based on crazy pivot tables and conditionals.

I've seen more spreadsheets than I would care to admit, and what drives me crazy about each and everyone is that it is not readily apparent where the work is being done. I think you could say the same about a "programming language" except that the programming language is usually not also the product. When the interface is the code and the output, the lack of consistent implementation is something I find frustrating.

It's a nice thought experiment, but in my mind I think the world would be a better place without excel.

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"It's a nice thought experiment, but in my mind I think the world would be a better place without excel. "

I agree with most everything you said, however, proliferation of programming and automation is a net win in my books, no matter the medium, and good spreadsheet software does this incredibly well. It makes programming in its very basic form accessible to a wide amount of users with a relative gradual and easy to grasp learning curve. Sure you can always improve on it, but I think the world would most definitely not be better off without it.

I do agree that the work is hidden, they can be a nightmare to audit, and I think it would scare a lot of people on this board the amount of business critical functions that are completed by excel and other spreadsheets. However, I like to think this a short term problem, and to the authors point, the industry and the sw needs and will improve, and we should all be trying to eventually close the gap.

Honestly, I think nearly the exact reverse -- the world would be a better place with more Excels and fewer "languages as we think of them."

Separation of "developer" and "user" is artificial and more should be done to recognize that.

In my professional life, I've come to understand the difference between a developer and a user is the degree to which they can think about a problem riggeriously. Most users work at a very high level, a developer helps them break problems down and think about things concretely.

> Separation of "developer" and "user" is artificial and more should be done to recognize that.

I've seen some company ROI models built in excel that I think would change your mind about this.

I bet they wouldn't be much different from some C++/Perl, and VB 6 / COM stuff I have seen as well.

> When the interface is the code and the output, the lack of consistent implementation is something I find frustrating

This is the reason why spreadsheets are popular in the first place, though. I won't ever defend them - I'm on a project right now that's been working on Excel for years, I know the pain! - but this is something that's worth thinking about.

See also Jupyter Notebooks, yet another invention from the deep pits of hell. The popularity of the interactive paradigm is undeniable. Would the world be better if everyone started using something sane instead? Definitely so. But the world would also be better if every day was Christmas and that's not going to happen either.

So while I share most of your concerns, I'm mostly sympathetic with the OP.

I don’t know why you would say that.

Excel is democratizing tool for programming. It’s a true WYSIWYG for databases, calculations, plotting, and more. And it’s just a regular app that every PC has.

Everyone needs a table. Hey did you know your table can do math automatically? It actually can fetch live forex data too. And infinitely more.

>"It's a nice thought experiment, but in my mind I think the world would be a better place without excel."

I stopped using excel after this whole subscription madness started and switched to native Softmaker Office. I keep countless small spreadsheets for various money related tasks and absolutely not prepared to spend any time / effort on doing it "the right way". My brain cells are much better off working on software design (the stuff that actually makes me money).

Your points are definitely valid criticisms.

And the world (for CS-type folks) would certainly be better. For everyone else, I think it would be a whole lot worse. I don't think its a stretch to say excel had enabled billions (trillions?) of dollars to be realized without the need for CS staff, where CS/software purchases would have otherwise been required. I wonder if this is partly why its a reoccurring meme on HN, which has a heavy CS following?

Perhaps the world would be a better place with an excel replacement of some sort.

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