The example of "why spreadsheets bad" made me wonder - why don't spreadsheets have a visual indicator for cells with a formula rather than a static value?
The macro was the first thing that came to mind. Your formula is cleaner.
When needed, a visual indication can easily be created with conditional formatting, or with the Show Formulas command (Ctrl+`), as noted by the sibling. Know your tools is the answer here.
I don't agree with that. It's like saying in JavaScript the "const" -keyword is distracting because it creates a distinction between values that are constant and values that change during running the program.
The spreadsheet-app might have a "publish-mode" where the distinction between inputs and formulas is hidden but in general it helps that user can easily distinguish between between inputs and procedures.
Distinction does not imply distraction.
What is often distracting is the need to spend mental effort to make a distinction, to try to understand a spreadsheet.
You might as well say that gaslighting in general reduces distraction, because there are fewer distinctions you can make in the gas-light.
Though like you can optionally use const (for varying degres of optional depending on your local coding style rules), you can optionally highlight formulas using conditional formatting based on the ISFORMULA() function.
It does seem like something that makes sense to be a built-in though.
Big companies have all the money to modernize their systems yet they know the execution is difficult if not impossible to achieve in time. The classical story about running an older operating system and/or application that works instead on venturing on modernizing it.
But I do like the idea of different kinds of cells having a different style entirely. You can style them yourself but a default theme would be a cool feature.
A 2nd improvement I would go for would be to allow the cell-formula to be written in JavaScript.
https://developers.google.com/apps-script/guides/sheets/func...