chmelynski

Among other things, spreadsheets allow you to see and fix one-off errors caused by bad data. A "real" programming language is great when you have clean data, but the real world is messy and businesses generally don't devote enough effort to cleaning data. So the person doing the analysis usually has to both scrub the data and do the calculations.

Thanks! Should be fixed now

I almost like it, but it just has... it has... too many notes. Yes, that's exactly it. Too many notes.

What would be really great would be the ability to penetrate existing tissue with nanowire sensors.

Let me try and cover most limitations by saying this: a spreadsheet should basically be an interface to a Lisp interpreter. The ability to define new functions (within the spreadsheet itself) is the biggest thing, I guess. But if the spreadsheet is just an interface to Lisp, you get everything else, too.

Another problem is that you're stuck working with tables. Tables are great, but I want to be able to edit other data structures in a spreadsheet-like way.

Especially trees. Trees are everywhere. Mathematical functions, HTML, code in pretty much every programming language, XML documents (which include Word and Excel). All trees.

Joel Spolsky claims in his Trello post (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2012/01/06.html) that Excel is about simple creation of tables, and great mass-appeal products are about the data structure they revolve around.

I think trees are underserved. I want to be able to write a tree, not 2 + 4 * 5 / 6, or <html><head><body></html>, or (((()()()))()())))(()()()())).

Plus you don't have to give up tables. Making a table out of a tree is easy (think HTML tables). Modeling a tree with a table is more clunky, in my opinion.

I think that a well-designed product along these lines could drag millions of "non-programmer" spreadsheet users all the way to Lisp.

Might I note that spreadsheets have immediate feedback. They also enforce a pure functional style (which you can break out of by bolting on a script written in a completely different language. Makes it possible to mutate state, but you have to do it consciously, and it requires a context switch).

Both of these are great features for programming. I sometimes use a spreadsheet to "mock up" a function, if I think the function is amenable to such a thing.

Unfortunately, spreadsheets have pretty severe limitations as general computing environments.

My favorite example of this is Kafka, who worked for an insurance company. Who else but someone working in a large, bureaucratic organization could have written the kind of stuff he wrote? And his work contains some of the best reflections on the nature of modern life, the fact that we're just in this huge machine and understand at most 0.00000001% of it.