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Comment by mromanuk | Hacker News Reader

> I personally think that the evolution of spreadsheets is less about changing the UI, and instead making it possible for spreadsheet users to easily transition to more powerful programming tools in a natural and easy way. So I've spent the past 2 years building Mito [2].

Following the article idea of spreadsheet as the best paradigm, why you think users should abandon it in favor of other?

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Spreadsheets are the best way to represent data, but there is a very long-tail of tasks one might to perform with their data. Requiring all of them to be built into a visual UI pretty much insists you end up with Excel - what feels like 1 billion features, where each user knows <1% of them (and costs millions of programmer-hours to build).

I don't think users can/should leave spreadsheets for the tasks spreadsheets make sense for (basic data munching, pivoting, many formulas, etc). But being able to easily transition your spreadsheet to other tools in a easy/native way is a huge win - and why at least half of our users are actually just Python programmers who use Mito because it makes that transition back and forth to spreadsheet/code so easy!

I don't think anyone should abandon tools if they are working for them :-)

I always encourage and applaud efforts to improve the stats quo, I suspect however that if there were a more efficient way for power users to quickly interact with data we would have found it by now.

In fact, to interact with large sets of data we have found it and it’s SQL. Again for power users. You data geeks are of course an exception and have a completely different set of tools.

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