Comment by RcouF1uZ4gsC | Hacker News Reader

Comment by RcouF1uZ4gsC | Hacker News Reader

This article completely misunderstands the users of spreadsheets:

>users of spreadsheets are already thinking in terms of matrices of values

I am pretty sure most users of Excel are not thinking about matrices. They are thinking of rows and columns. Programmers and mathematicians might generalize this to matrices and values, but the users themselves are not thinking about it. This is akin to viewing Tinder as a "human interaction app" and lumping it in with Slack under that abstraction, and not realizing that those are two very different use cases and mindsets of the user.

> The spreadsheet paradigm hides what's important (the formulas) in favor of the superficial (the data)

To most users, the data is what is important in a spreadsheet and the formulas are implementation details.

> To most users, the data is what is important in a spreadsheet and the formulas are implementation details.

In my experience of erm... hardcore-spreadsheeting (engineering, finance)... the cells whose value matters and become a final report that motivates design/decision-making are a tiny percentage of the total cells. Most of the cells in a spreadsheet are either raw data or intermediate values. Their values have no real meaning to the author, just steps in a long calculation. They might look at them for sanity checking but if they need to verify their values then that is better as another calculation not by repeated manual inspection.

Of course there are many types of spreadsheet user. Every cell value matters for your Vinyl collection or whatever :)

That was not the point of the statement. The argument (possibly poorly phrased) was the there are people people out there that are comfortable with manipulating arrays of numbers than there are programmers who are capable of writing a Java program.

So, if the goal is to make it easier for someone to take the leap from a spreadsheet to a programming language, array languages are likely an easier hill to climb (people already familiar with, say, Python, might struggle, but they are not likely to be interested in learning a new programming paradigm anyway).

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