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Comment by immibis | Hacker News Reader

Feels a bit like the no-code paradox though. When you make a sufficiently advanced no-code (or no-database) tool it becomes equivalent to code (or a database) and even though it does entice a novice to start using it, a complex system made in it is still complex code (or a complex database) and ends up requiring a competent programmer (or db admin) to maintain it, who wishes it was written the normal way to begin with.

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I have no doubt that the stories of complex spreadsheet models as the beating heart of a business are true. But those models are likely the sole survivor from a thousand dead and gone spreadsheets that people extracted value from for a time, but just didn't have the ongoing utility or wide enough audience to merit being turned into a dashboard or web app. It would be a mistake to insist that all of those spreadsheets should have started life as something else, just in case maintenance should someday become necessary.

In other words, one of the core use cases for a spreadsheet is that it empowers a broad swathe of users (broader than Tableau or PowerBI) to quickly extract insights from their data to fill immediate needs.

Or at least, that's a core use case if you can get your data into a spreadsheet without too much trouble.

And then the attached part of this that you mentioned is that the cursed survivors have essentially outcompeted their peers for survival. They're winners of a genetic algorithm whose basis is company data. They have close contact with actual reality, and have been beaten carefully into shape by it. I have kind of a grudging respect for these because of that, actually.

> It would be a mistake to insist that all of those spreadsheets should have started life as something else, just in case maintenance should someday become necessary.

The problem corporate IT/Dev folks face isn't that an idea started as a low-code tool, but rather that the low-code solution is often dumped on them with no budget or desire to improve it to be more reliable and maintainable.

At least until something fails... and usually in dramatic fashion that then wakes leadership up to the idea that maybe we should invest more into this critical business process. If the company didn't go under in the meantime.

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