Comment by thwarted | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thwarted | Hacker News Reader

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This touches on one of my pet theories. Spreadsheets were remarkably successful because they never require you to express a model abstractly (i.e. they never require you to write the formulas up front and plug in data later - which is the way that programming languages work).

My pet theory is that people have a love of grids and graph paper -- I remember in grade school how graph paper was, for some reason, a rare thing, and it was treasured. The kid with a whole stack of graph paper and who DREW PICTURES OF TANKS AND DRAGONS ON IT was considered some kind of blasphemous rouge, but still respected because of access to graph paper. It brought some indication of order to the otherwise sloppy handwriting on looseleaf we had to do.

And that love of the grid translated into a love of spreadsheets. It's so neat and clean, ready to be filled up with MY organized madness! All those empty boxes, what fun! Look, I made a list of items! And it's arranged in neat rows and columns! And besides, who needs to be able to join these product ids with sales numbers? We can do that with a hundred clicks or so and create a pivot table!

Everything begins to look like a nail when your hammer of choice is Excel.

Now I am going to have to say that the spreadsheet UI is hugely valuable for three reasons: it fits the way non-programmers' minds work, it's familiar, and... it feels like graph paper!

Considering the kinds of things I've seen people put in spreadsheets, and the way they format them, I'm sure I could dig up a few examples of spreadsheets NOT fitting the way non-programmer's minds work, because they try to make it do things it wasn't meant to and it ends up being MORE work.

I don't doubt that such examples exist, but I'm adamant on this point: the spreadsheet is the invention that gave non-programmers the power to define their own computations. That's why it was so successful. It's the only "programming for non-programmers" invention I know of, of the zillions that have been tried, that doesn't suck. Can you name any others? The ones that come to my mind are the laughable boxes-and-lines "visual programming" gimmicks.

Oh, I agree with that. But I think the perception of (mock) organization it provides and its visual similarity to graph paper is what draws people to it. The power of spreadsheets are in the computations, and of course people use it for that, but I bet there are just as many spreadsheets that contain entirely static content as there exist spreadsheets that actually use spreadsheets as more than just a glorified grid formatting engine. I've seen people do calculations with desk calculators and then type the results into their spreadsheets. It does let non-programmers define their own computations, but I wouldn't call what non-programmers do with it to be programming, "computation for non-programmers", most definitely. I believe this may come down to how the both of us define programming, however.

Interesting contrast, though, is the relative avoidance of accounting ledgers, which spreadsheets are a closer cousin to than they are to graph paper.

My pet theory is that if people weren't able to to spend time setting up complex and impressive looking spreadsheets they would be bored out of their minds.

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