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Comment by tableofzero | Hacker News Reader

By far the most popular programming language in the world is propriatary -- Excel.

Excel is built with programming language and can certainly be used as one, but that doesn't mean it is one. It's also a bit anal to classify Excel as a programming language, most people would say spreadsheets are a tool, where you could write programs, but again, doesn't mean it's a programming language. At most, I'd give you that Excel is a tool that can do "visual programming", but that's far of from being a "programming language".

This is unfair and a far too narrow definition of programming language. Excel sits very squarely in the functional reactive language space. Just because most of it's users don't "know" they are programming and most of our common tools don't work with it doesn't change the fact that it has pretty much all of the building blocks that any programming language gives you. Are there domains where Excel is awkward to use? Absolutely. The same can be said about pretty much any programming language.

Excel deserves to have the label of programming language even if it shuns that label due to it's target audience.

I guess what I was trying to say that Excel as commonly known, is a programming environment, rather than a language. Where you can use the "Excel" programming language for performing most (if not all) tasks a general purpose programming language can.

But it's still a bit like saying "Eclipse" is a programming language. You can do programming in Eclipse, that is true, but you can also do other things that are not programming, which makes Eclipse a programming environment. Just like with Excel.

I don't think this is a true dividing line for a programming language. The Smalltalk language for instance combines both the programming environment and the language together. I don't think anyone seriously argues that smalltalk is not a programming language.

Seems like equivocation — Smalltalk is a programming language when we're using "Smalltalk" to mean Smalltalk the programming language and Smalltalk is a programming environment when we're using "Smalltalk" to mean Smalltalk the programming environment.

Either way it is still entirely valid to refer to Smalltalk as a programing language.

As-long-as you actually mean a "narrow definition of programming language" otherwise you're saying one thing while meaning another.

The label of programming language goes to Visual Basic for Applications (VBA).

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/vba/api/overview/exc...

Excel has conditionals and several forms of map/reduce which stand in for loops all without relying on VBA. I stand by my statement that Excel qualifies in everyway that matters as a programming language.

They avoid that label because of their target audience but the label absolutely applies.

There's many open-source alternatives to Excel. Rarely used, but it settles any fear of lock in.

This also made the area palatable for other commercial competitors to enter the space - Google-sheets drive A TON of enterprise org work nowadays.

You could say that open-source alternatives immensely popularized spreadsheets and resulted in the very nice ecosystem we have now.

Sure, heave finance user stick to MS Excell because MS is pressured to cater very well to their needs, else they will move away to other free or paid alternatives.

Also, there's a reason why multi-dimensional spreadheets are not more popular despite solving so many problems of regular spreadheets: all are proprietary and very different one from another - you probably pick smth like Quantrix (https://quantrix.com/products/quantrix-modeler/), and you'd get insane prices and 100% lock-in... better stick to Excell and/or its open-source and/or free alternatives despite being a worse tool :)

Since when is Google sheets not proprietary?

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